Cindy pointed me to Konfabulator last week, and I had a
chance to download it and set it up a couple of days ago. It’s pretty
slick. They were recently bought by Yahoo! and now the whole thing is free (I guess
it used to cost $40 or something). Basically it’s a framework for widgets
that live on your Windows or Mac desktop. There are a bunch of widgets
that come with it, and several hundred submitted from community developers.
I’m using a small calendar widget, a countdown widget, a picture slideshow
widget, and a weather widget on my spare monitor right now. I’ve also got
a widget installed that lists the Google Page Rank of a list of sites.
You can create your own widgets, but I haven’t gotten into that yet. I
do have a couple of requests for widgets if anybody knows of them (or wants to
build them) — an Alexa rank widget just like the Google Page Rank widget, and a
ToDo Task List that ties into Outlook’s task list and only shows me today’s
tasks.