#Konfabulator.
Now that my trial period has expired, I shall issue a brief, inconsequential review of: Konfabulator!
the good: The idea is definitely good. I like the concept of being able to throw a bunch of neat little dynamic, iconic graphics on my desktop to feed me information. Especially since I can set them to be more/less transparent an unobtrusive. In particular, I *love* the weather widget and thought that that was the neatest damn thing since sliced f00kin’ bread on my Aqua desktop. I could also get in to the uptime read-out, and the iTunes remote widget, the mini-calendar, etc. etc. And since so much of it seems rooted in this open XML/JavaScript-based API (upon my cursory glance, at least) it’s just about infinitely available for anyone to whip out just about … well whatever!
the bad: OS X has enough problems with memory leaks to load up this bad boy. Perhaps the ultimate irony was when I loaded up the Memory widget and noticed that my free memory just started to bottom out. All those pretty, fancy graphics don’t mean shit if you’re system is just going to choke and/or suffer b/c of them all. Sure, run one or two of these and you shouldn’t have a whole lot of trouble but in excess of 5 or 6 and you may notice some slow-downs. Granted, KetelOne doesn’t rock out on a gig o’ RAM (it *is* a G3 iBook, after all) but just the same… Plus, let’s face it, so many of the widgets are lame. Troll through Konfabulator.com and you’ll see at least 20 iTunes remote control widgets; not to mention all of the assorted “count down” widgets and/or battery read-out clones. And so many of these are available right there in the system to begin with (e.g., Airport signal, battery life) or are available through free apps (MenuMeters). The weather widget is probably the only really, truly awesome one out there. There are some neat ones, granted — but not enough to make Konfabulator a killer app. Which stinks — b/c it’s still a neat idea with a slick interface.
I never liked Konfabulator. Granted it was a pretty tool, but the programming was horrendous. It crashed frequently, ate memory, and had a ton of memory leaks. I was able to run 15 apps concurrently, including SETI@Home and Folding@Home clients and still never experienced a slow down like I did with Konfabulator. Apparently, the design of KFB was such that its leaks would quickly fill up memory and its constant memory accesses would then be forced to be swapped out and in time and time again. Major drag on the system. I agree with your assesement.
Quick point that you may already know:
At the terminal prompt type ‘top’ to see the current running processes as well as memory usage.
At the terminal type ‘leaks [appname]‘ to see the memory leaks for a given program. KFB, at the version that I used it on my old computer had quite a hefty list.
-m
May 29th, 2004 at 11:10 am[...] To follow up on my Konfabulator post from late May… And while I’m a little late on this: Daring Fireball’s ‘Dashboard vs. Konfabulator’. [...]
November 16th, 2005 at 12:10 pm