Since Konfabulator went free, I’ve had it installed on two of my Windows machines and my Mac Mini (which I don’t use enough to justify an upgrade to Tiger). One thing I found really useful were the system info tools. Particularly on a laptop, it’s great to have a easy to see visual indicator of your battery and wifi strength. It’s also nice to have memory and CPU readouts too.
The problem was almost all of the system info widgets available just showed a single property. The “compact” series is nice, but I like to make these indicators topmost so they are always visible, and even 4-5 compact widgets generaly got in the way of something on the screen.
There were some small, show-everything system info widgets, but the ones I saw were all text based. I wanted to see where things were at in a glance.
So I decided to create my own. It wasn’t too hard given the tutorials and reference material on the Konfabulator site. It’s just png files, xml and javascript. And the WidgetConverter widget packages everything up for you, cross-platform and all.
So here it is, the System101 Widget:
You get CPU, memory, battery, wifi/airport strength, and disk space, all in a 40×77 pixel mini-widget. Unobtrusive enough to stick in a corner, set to topmost window. Easy to tell at a glance what’s happening with your system.
Not many options at this point. You can adjust the refresh rate from 0 to 15 seconds. It does the job perfectly for what I want, but if someone wants some more preferences, I might look at updating it.
Get it here: http://www.bit-101.com/widgets/System101.widget
Very neat and compact, but only the CPU and MEM works on my PC? Wifi and disk shows nothing? Suggestions?
J
Sweet. Most widget designers seem to like making huge things that take up half your desktop. Small unobtrustive widgets are way better in my opinion.
Also glad to hear you got the book finished 🙂 Now on to the next one? 😉
“Now on to the next one?”
Not in the next couple of years anyway. I need a break.