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Friday, June 9, 2006
Konfabulator, a widget engine originally made for the Mac desktop, has got to be one of the best third-party applications available. It was one of those killer-apps that you could only find on the Mac. Well when Apple released its Dashboard, in essence ripping off Konfabulator (and yes I know of the debate about how Apple did widgets a loooong time ago), the authors of Konfabulator opened its program to the tens of millions of Windows users. Soon after, Yahoo dumped some big cash into those very same authors bank account and the name changed to Yahoo! Widgets.
What made Konfabulator (sorry, just can’t call this thing Yahoo anything) so great was it’s beauty and function. The various widgets perfectly fit in with the Aqua interface of OS X and the ability to take already installed applications to the next level was magnificent. My favorite was the iTunes Mini Remote. The Slide Show and analog clock were also other favorites. I found myself spending hours browsing the hundreds of widgets for Konfabulator.
One widget I recently found allowed me to view Google Calendar feeds. Since Google was doing something odd with its RSS feed (according to the RSS Powers-that-be, the feed is not a legit one), I couldn’t use an RSS reader for it. iCal feeds worked fine, though. But that did me no good on my PC. A widget by Jared Shenson allowed me to view that feed on my Windows desktop. I immediately fell in love with GCal.
GCal had one thing missing and so I popped a note to Jared. He was more than willing to make some changes. In fact, he was rewriting the entire thing to make it even better he told me. When he e-mailed me yesterday to tell me he was done, all I could say when I installed the update was, “Wow!” It rox!
New for GCal is the addition of an easy setup wizard, support for up to 10 calendars (!), add events with a Quick Add button, three different view modes (Daily, 3-Day, Monthly), notifications, 6 different color themes, and built-in auto-update. And just for a kicker, Jared added integrated Google Search. Not bad for your Yahoo Widget engine, huh? 