mindless ramblings

The first signs of Yahoo-ness in Konfabulator appeared today, with a rebranding to become the Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.0.

The good thing is that despite the redesigned installer, everything else is pretty much like the good old Konfabulator. The Weather widget (which is awesome, BTW) now takes its info from Yahoo! Weather, but nevertheless looks the same. There’s some new widgets which are quite interesting though. Besides the obligatory Yahoo! Mail widget, there’s a really nice one which displays a Google Maps-esque draggable interface, as well as widgets to integrate your contact list and other info with your Yahoo! account.

Now with Flickr, del.icio.us and Konfabulator all under the same umbrella, it’s quite possible that we will see widgets and other apps harnessing the power of all these cool technologies by way of the Yahoo! Developer Network. I don’t know about Flickr and del.icio.us, but creating your own widget for Konfabulator is pretty straightforward. If you have a little experience in Photoshop, Javascript and XML, you can whip up a good-looking widget in no time. Whether it’s useful is another story though. Although I’ve edited some widgets to adapt them to my tastes, I’ve never created a widget from scratch. If anybody has ideas for a widget, leave it in my comments and maybe I’ll develop it!