The recent announcement that Yahoo! had acquired Pixoria the makers of Konfabulator piqued my interest in Konfabulator itself. I was vaguely aware that Tiger’s “Dashboard†had embraced and extended Konfabulator(with all that that implies) but I hadn’t actually tried Konfabulator (and my old G3 Mac certainly wasn’t going to run Tiger).The primary change triggered by the Yahoo announcement is that Konfabulator is now a free download. The purpose of the application is to allow you to place snippets of information in an attractive way (with hip transparency and fade effects) on your desktop. That information might be local (e.g. the system clock, the CPU load, network traffic) but things get more interesting when those snippets come from the Internet. Indeed, since Yahoo! is essentially a repository of information their acquisition of Pixoria and Konfabulator as a means to move that information to more desktops makes sense at least at one level.From a development point of view Konfabulator is interesting in that it provides a “widget†plug-in architecture as a primary feature. Interestingly, the supported language for writing widgets is JavaScript (mostly embedded in an XML plug-in manifest). What with all the fuss and bother about AJAX, getting a somewhat better feel for JavaScript programming has been on my “to do†list for a while so I off I went.
- The Konfabulator Development Guide can be found here
- A useful introductory tutorial is here
- Since a lot of information on the Internet comes in the form of XML, XML for Script
For my first widget, I’ve got an idea about displaying certain kinds of data available at Amazon, so I’m using the Amazon’s Web Service APII had hoped to write unit tests using JsUnit but its not clear that I can get enough coverage once I’ve abstracted out all of the Konfabulator specific bits (since JsUnit is designed to run in browsers). I’ll probably need to roll my own unit testing strategy. Ah well.We’ll see how this goes…