How To... A step-by-step guide to tweaking your PC experience
Y
ou just bought a kick-ass, 23-inch, flat-panel
display—which you paired with your old mon-
itor—and now you have more screen real estate
than you know what to do with. Enter Konfabulator.
Konfabulator lets you add applications and instru-
mentation to your desktop that can display damn near
any info you want. You can add everything from the
weather in Bogotá, to your CPU usage, to the traffic
conditions in your own home town, to cover art for the
track you’re playing in iTunes. There are also dozens
of utility widgets that serve as shortcuts to your fre-
quently used FTP sites and quick Internet searches.Konfabulator works its magic through a combi-
nation of Javascript code (which scrapes the net for
the data you need) and XML (which describes the
widget’s appearance). You’ll find more than 400 applets
on Konfabulator’s web site; if you’re familiar with
Javascript and XML, you’ll discover that it’s very easy to
create your own.
The best thing about Konfabulator is its low impact.
Even with 10 or more applets running, the Konfabulator
absorbs just a tiny fraction of your CPU and memory.
Interested? Let’s get started then!Maximize your screen real
estate with dozens of handy
data-gathering widgets
Konfabulate
YOUR DESKTOP
Konfabulator is like an instrument panel for your desktop. Add any info you want directly
to your desktop without taking a huge performance hit!BY WILL SMITH
MARCH 2005 MAXIMUMPC
Download and
Install Konfabulator
This step’s really easy. Go to http://www.
konfabulator.com and download the trial
version of the software. Once you’ve
installed it, the Getting Started widget
will activate several common widgets,
including a clock, a stock ticker, and a
basic weather applet. Take a few min-
utes and play around with each widget.
You can drag and drop them anywhere
on your desktop, but the real fun
starts when you get into the right-click
Preferences. There you can customize
your widgets to suit your needs—after
all, if you live in Omaha, you don’t
need the weather in Kalamazoo. Once
you have a good grip on what your
widgets can do, move on to step two.