Yahoo! Widgets

Konfabulator is Now Yahoo! Widgets

By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Yahoo WidgetsYahoo has taken over the Konfabulator widget program which allows users to add “widgets” to their desktop that can show everything from stock quotes to CPU usage and works with both Windows and Mac OS’s. I personally hadn’t used any widgets programs in quite some time because I felt that they weren’t very mature when I first looked at them, but it’s obvious to me that Konfabulator has advanced quite a bit since the last time I tried it out. It’s very easy to install the program and widgets which is a plus compared with some of the programs and widgets I’ve tried before. If you know how to download a program from the internet and double-click, you can install and use Konfabulator.

After installing Konfabulator on my system, I immediately noticed that it can be a RAM hog (using 30+MB easily), however, it doesn’t take up a lot of CPU time. On the system I’m currently using, a 1.3Ghz Athlon with 512MB RAM, the widgets don’t seem to bog the system down at all while using office applications. I haven’t tried any gaming with them though. Suffice it to say, you probably wouldn’t want to run Konfabulator on a system with 256MB of RAM or less. Barring the large amounts of RAM usage, this is a really great program. My favorite widget right now is definitely the “Picture Frame” which can randomly cycle through pictures either on your computer or on a Flickr account. I also like “The Weather”, “Stock Ticker”, and “SysMonitor” which all either come with the program or can be downloaded from the Widget Gallery. One other nice thing about these widgets is that they’re all free! I highly recommend you download Yahoo! Widgets and give it a try.