'Tis obviously the season of neat things. Konfabulator has suddenly hit the radar, partly from a Version 2.1 release that supports XMLHTTPRequest, partly because its just become registration free, and partly because they've jut been bought by Yahoo.
Konfabulator is basically a tool for creating desktop widgets - your PC ends up looking like a Mac. It also gives a taste of what Longhorn might be like, and it XML application development environment. The Widgets can be anything from RSS news and weather feeds, to Flickr or local image, earthquake alerts - just about anything you can think of.
The great thing about them (apart from being cross-Platofrm, ie Mac and PC) is that they are written in a combination of XML and Javascript. No legacy languages, and apart from the complexity that it Javascript, a real attempt to encourage more users to customise their own applications and PCs. Another contribution to the global programming mash-up that the web is becoming.
First off the stocks from me will be something to dispay my Bayesian News Reader (although I might be able to use an off-the-shelf widget for some of that), and there' always the BBC Backtage TV information, or a news alerter. This stuff just gets better and better.
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