November 14, 2004
Desktop Toys
Last weekend, in my never-ending quest to avoid doing anything useful with my free time, I began playing around with some Desktop Toys. I was successful in wasting an entire weekend! And I see much time-wasting potential for the future.
What set me off on this latest craze was the announcement that the Konfabulator team had released a new version of it's javascript based desktop widget application that works on Windows. Mac people have had this toy for a while. The app allows you to download and set up desktop widgets, which basically look like gigantic icons, which allow you to run mini-applications or functions on your desktop. You can have a clock, a weather notification, access to hard drives and folders, mp3 players and lots of other time-wasting distractions. The charm of this is hard to describe, you have to try it for yourself. I hadn't thought I wanted weather on my desktop-I hate the Weatherbug software, which is full of spyware nastiness, but the Konfabulator weather widget turned out to be fun. I found a New York City traffic cam widget, and I was slightly embarrassed at some of the pictures the picture frame widget found on my hard drive.
Next Time: Desktop Toys II-Playing with Themes
Posted by Trigger Tech at November 14, 2004 1:17 AM Permalink
