Yahoo Widgets 4: Memory Hog Be Gone
Yahoo has announced the availability of Yahoo Widgets 4, or as we affectionately call it: Konfabulator. Konfabulator was around back in 2002, long before Dashboard or Vista Gadgets. In fact, many argue that both of these widget platforms are direct copies of Konfabulator’s sleek design and implementation. The new version offers a glut of new features.
For Yahoo Widgets 4, the team has made extensive optimizations under the hood to decrease RAM usage and increase overall speed, a welcome feature of any application update. The app includes a new major feature, the widget dock. Much like the tray and sidebar in Dashboard and Vista, this easily hideable dock sits to the side of your screen and offers instant access to your widgets. In addition, Yahoo has made it even easier to find new widgets and update existing ones with one click widget browsing and automatic widget updating. And of course, the best feature of Yahoo Widgets still holds true in the new revision: it’s 100% free. Even after it’s acquisition by Yahoo, Konfabulator is still a solid Mac app. The design is sleek and stunning, as one expects from any native OS X app.
The new platform integrates well into the operating system, and yet sadly, the once simple Konfabulator widget interface has become increasingly complex with numerous buttons of the same size and shape aligning many widgets, and some may find the uncluttered widget layout of Dashboard is still preferable. Whatever your opinion, for the price, Yahoo Widgets 4 is still a best-of-breed app that deserves a fair look from any Mac user.
Nice writeup Jamie. I may just try this out, but I wish Apple would take a similar approach with dashboard in using less system resources. In fact that’s the reason why I rarely use the dashboard anymore.
Hmm I may have to try this. Dashboard is quite the memory hog.
i’ve been using this for a couple of weeks. it’s really nice, better than dashboard really. the biggest difference is that you can dock the yahoo widget on your desktop. don’t think you can do that w/ dashboard widgets (although correct me if i’m wrong). try it out.
I am just sticking through w/ dashboard until leopard. In tiger, every widget creates its own instance. so if you are running multiple widgets, they can definitely be resource-hogging. But in leopard, every/all instance of running widgets will be unified into one running process.
I can’t really imagine myself using this now that I have dashboard. Last time I checked, all the widgets available for Konfabulator (yes, I’m still calling it that) sucked compared to the amount of great Dashboard “gadgets”.
[...] Originally from MacApper by Jamie Diamond reBlogged by Simon Menke on Apr 4, 2007, 12:00PM [...]
[...] Apple added the Dashboard to OS X, Mac users used Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets). While Konfabulator put its widgets on the desktop, OS X puts its widgets on the Dashboard. Many [...]