Switching to Konfabulator

A couple months ago, I decided that Dashboard wasn’t totally worthless and started using it to keep tabs on baseball games, post to my blog, look up phone numbers, check the weather, and look at the calendar. After a couple weeks, however, I went back to not using it. One of the main points of having widgets is quick access to information. This goal is undermined when it takes several seconds for widgets to begin functioning after Dashboard is invoked.

Last week, when I saw that Yahoo had bought Konfabulator and released it for free, I didn’t consider trying it out. Not sure why.

As I was going through my feeds today, I noticed that one of TUAW’s writers had switched back to Konfabulator, I decided that I should at least give it a chance. So, I installed it and used TinkerTool to disable Dashboard.

So far, I’m happy to have made the switch. Konfabulator’s memory footprint seems to be much smaller than Dashboard’s. And because they’re always running on my desktop, the Konfabulator widgets are ready to be used as soon as I need them. There is no warmup time for network-enabled widgets.

But the biggest difference between Konfabulator and Dashboard is choice. Dashboard is always on. Its widgets are only available on Dashboard desktop. (Yes, I know that these things can be changed. These are not things that the average user would know how to do, though.) Konfabulator can be stopped and started, just like any other application. Its widgets can live on the desktop with everything else. Or they can live on their own desktop. They can behave like windows or be part of the desktop. They can be made to stay on top or in the background. You get the idea.