Dec 08 2005
Widgets!
I wrote here last month about fooling around with Konfabulator, and I have been having a lot of fun with it. It really does remind me of working in BASIC all those years ago, with little programs that do cool stuff, and nary an MSDN browser session in sight. Working with Konfabulator reminds me of those days in other ways as well. Debugging facilities are pretty much limited to print statements, log messages, and alert boxes. You don’t have to be a programmer to enjoy Konfabulator. It is a compact program, trivial to install and set up, and comes with a bunch of cool widgets. Many more are available on the online gallery. But if you are a programmer then you can hardly use it for very long without making widgets of your own. True to form I couldn’t do a simple “Hello World” thing. Nope. I have a new computer built on AMD’s dual core Athlon XP processor, and I wanted a widget that monitored CPU loads for both cores. Why would you want to monitor CPU loads? Just because. I called my widget CPUSpy, and it looks like this:
If you have Konfabulator you can click on the image above and then click ‘download’ on the file page to grab the widget. Once it is downloaded just double click the file to install it. You’ll need Windows XP, Server 2003, or Vista, for reasons I will detail below. Creating this widget turned out to be an interesting and sometimes frustrating exercise, for a couple of different reasons. Continue Reading »
