Friday, July 29, 2005

COOLEST WIDGET EVER!

OK, I've totally fallen in love with widgets. Actually, mostly just one... and it's not even part of Mac OSX's Dashboard! The best part is all you PC PEOPLE can use it, too! huzzah!

What is it? Konfabulator's iTunes Companion. It is so awesome! If you use iTunes, and have ventured down the path of trying to grab artwork for your CD's either using Fetch or something similar, then you know how time consuming it can be. Well, Konfabulator's iTunes Companion is not only this cool little interface that allows you to play/pause/etc - but it actually goes out, grabs the artwork & downloads it and copies it into your iTunes for you!!! uhh... RAD!

So because I'm a big geek, here's some screenshots for you to check it out for yourself. You can choose to have this side/info window open or not, but personally I think it's awesome that while shuffling randomly through your massive collection, you can 1.) Quickly see all the other songs on that album 2.) View all the other albums you have by that artist 3.) Get to your entire library & 4.) Playlists! (numbers & detail reference to the thumbnails below, showing the buttons highlighted. The 5th one is his donate button)

FYI, you can actually choose to turn pretty much anything that you see here (control panel, progress bar, track info) on & off... or have it only appear when you roll over the cd cover. pretty sweet!

I use the medium size (above), but you can also have it small like this:

Or really large, like this:

And if it can't find the artwork - you can either use a custom image (my custom image is one I pulled from Threadless artist Gary Gao), have it be a blank CD jacket (not shown here), or a Not Available message - which as you can see, at any time the cd jacket can be clicked to instantly search google images if you want to find the artwork yourself!

Keep in mind it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn close. I find myself wanting to use it like the power user that I am, but it's doing quite a bit of work so you can't pound on it too hard - and be patient if it doesn't update right away, etc. The developer (Knut August Johansen from Norway!) has no doubt worked on it for hundreds of unpaid hours (I donated to him because I love it so much). But, it's definitely kick ass & if you're patient with it and/or are willing to kick him some money - I have no doubt it's only going to get better & better. Oh - big tip: Read the document that comes with the app, you'll learn a lot (go figure).

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For Mac Dashboard users - I highly recommend you check out a little app called Amnesty to accompany your widgets/dashboard. It's actually similar to Konfabulator in the way that you can use just one widget at a time. When I first found this it was a godsend, because one of my RAM slots died & my computer had been chugging. To update you, the other day I got a new 1GB stick of RAM to put in the one slot that still works so I'm a bit better now, but for awhile there hitting F12 just made me wait for it to update all the widgets for a couple seconds - when usually I am only going there for one thing anyway! So Amnesty is awesome for that reason... check it out! Oh, and just in case you want a look see of the rest of them - I found out about Amnesty from this fun list of "widgets of the week".

Other widgets I use and/or have tried: tiny url, evite, googlemaps, weather (standard), craigslist, sprint minutes, and I even downloaded this all recipes one - even though I never cook things fancy enough to need a recipe! Thought it might inspire me. ;)

There WAS a cheap gas widget on apple's site, but now it's disappeared. So here's a link to Konfabulator's Cheap Gas widget. However, when I was looking around at the different options for finding (widgets & google mashup websites, etc) I actually found that cheap gas widget wasn't as accurate (?) or up-to-date as this site: SanFranGasPrices.com. The night I checked all those out I was going somewhere & successfully followed the tip-off to a place that was 2.48/gallon vs most of the ones around me I was seeing that were 2.58+ so I saved .10/gallon! woohoo!

Oh - there's a few BART schedule widgets, too, for those of you who take it. Now, tell me what your favorite widget is!