Konfabulator for Windows: Worth the hype?

I know I have said this before today z0mbie, but I have to agree with you 100% here. I stopped by Neowin this morning and saw the thread in which it was being discussed. So many of the comments were virtual orgasms about Konfabulator. So I downloaded it and tried it. It turned on and 6 widgets popped up. Not a single one was something I hadn't seen before in perhaps different, but equally well done visual presentation. Then for fun I opened Task Manager and totalled somewhere over 60-70 megs of RAM. Excuse me? I can run an entire Desktop X theme (like one of gef's) and add in additional widgets (imported as objects) and not have the RAM usage jump above 30-35 megs.

Sure, if this was your first exposure to widget apps I can see the excitement. But knowing and having played with what else is out there, well, I found Konfab sorely wanting.

Zombie I cant belive you left me out of this tussle! Good review. I agree with all of it. Although, I am completely biased. While I hate shamelessly plugging Kapsules, I'm working on some really really good additions to it.

Where is the DesktopX roadmap posted?

Andrew, do I ever forget you?

naw baby. mwahahaha

Kapsules update:
Andrew thought I forgot about him....

The Weather (Konfabulator): 7,968k
Systats FabWeather (AveDesk): 800k
Core Weather (DesktopX): 616k
Kap Weather (Kapsules): 5,770

Analog Clock (Konfabulator): 8,540k
Analog Clock (AveDesk): 453k
Core Clock (DesktopX): 2,388k
World Clock (Kapsules): 3,222k

iTunes Controller (Konfabulator): 9,792k
iTunes Controller (AveDesk): 1,556k
iTunes Controller (DesktopX): 2,332k
iTunes Controller (Kapsules): 2,537k

So, Kapsules is a little tougher on memory useage than DesktopX or AveDesk. It's still alot less than Konfabulator. Here's the Kapsules breakdown:

Kapsules
Moderate resource use.
Quality widgets.
Limited widgets 1/25th of the DesktopX library.
Easier to skin than DesktopX.
Difficult to script (if you don;t know how to script).

Overall, I like Kapsules, DesktopX and AveDesk. AveDesk spends more time as my base widget system for the following reasons:
It's easy to label and configure every object.
Every object is super easy to skin.
Low resources (not as low as DesktopX overall, Stardock wins the day here).
It keeps object settings and positions.

Two of those reasons are critical: Object position and labelling. Konfabulator and Kapsules don't allow a user to label objects. This is not because of the applications, but how the creators of each object scripted those objects. AveDesk and DesktopX have a uniform object labelling system. When cloning objects such as multiple FTP drops ( I use two that are critical) knowing which object is which is a must.
DesktopX loses points because objects jump around between reboots. An FTP drive can jump across the screen even when its position is locked down, as can any other object. The few DesktopX objects I do use are fantastic, and were obviously made with love and care. DesktopX has been getting alot of love and care lately, and as it's my first widget system its good to see this - I'll be watching EVERY DesktopX update closely to see where they take this.

Konfabulator is the big loser. It's very bloated, doesn't offer anything for $25 I cant get from the freeware version of DesktopX, Kapsules or AveDesk. Dont misunderstand me, I'm happy to pay for quality. Stardock has received much zombie pimping in the past, as has AveDesk. Kapsules has made a few very big leaps forward these past few months, and it's exciting to watch someone as cool as Andrew deliver goods to the masses - he's got that same drive that Brad Wardell and AndreasV have... that drive that keeps us customization junkies ripe with new goodies.
I think Arlo has that same light in his eye, we'll just have to wait and see.

Here's a little something interesting... theres a fix for Konfabulator memory useage, bringing it inline with the other Widget apps.

Powder Cleaner 2.0
This actually decreases the memory useage of everything, quite a nice little application.

Been using konfabulator for just a little over year on my Power Mac (1.8 single), so I thought what the. . .and downloaded it for my pc (intel 3.01 overclocked to 3.9) with 2 g of memory. And, guess what boys and girls; it slowed it down (just a bit, but a enough to notice).
However, the main problem was it didn't do anything that the widgets designed for DeskX couldn't do. Since I have already invested money into StarDock products there was no reason to use or pay for Konfabulator for my pc.
As to Kapsules when attempting to load it up it failed to load because .Net wasn't installed on my computer. Hence, as Konfabulator it went bye-bye.
In my humble (so humble) opinion what is the use of having three or more programs that do the same thing. Besides DeskX widgets can be run as stand alone app's. Good example (one I really like and have open on startup) is "Picture Framer" by Martin Conroy (great widget).

Pam

After thought:

I use Objectdock plus on my pc, and one of the tabs is a WIDGETS tab (DeskX style). What is nice about having the Widgets tab is the abililty to use widgets when needed without always having them on the desktop.

Pam

Beware of Powdercleaner, dead zombie.

You basically trade memory for CPU and it's not a good trade off if it's trying to make up lots of RAM.  What it does is that it rapidly swaps stuff to disk when it's not needed right then.  So you'll hear your hard drive crunch a lot more and your CPU use go up as a result.

 

Yeah Powdercleaner is the devil to system performance. Unless all you do is browse the web and chat on irc.

"Interesting to note here that Corew clock offers resizing, coloration and other features not included in the AveDesk and Konfabulator clocks)"

Ahem... one of the core features of avedesk is to independantly resize and colorize every desklet.

True, a feature I have so taken for granted that I forgot all about. Perhaps it was the resize tab on Core Clock that made me crazy... good to hear from you AndreasV. I didn't realize we had all the widget guys here!

Andreas, you can do that with all DesktopX objects too. What the core clock does differnetly is that it actually has a gripper on it to resize it.

A few things about Konfabulator have grown on me. Things that attribute to the quality and creativity of Konfabulator widget makers. First is the widget fnorder. Its a widget that delivers messages from "your secret masters" Things like "The button from the North Pole will go to Dallas" and A chicken from Mars tickles the siamese kitten". Things you'll only understand if you work for the Secret Masters.

The other widget I like is "Where is it". Pretty much the ultimate search tool, it allows you to easily search from Google, Amazon, Lycos, altavista, msn, overture, ebay, yahoo!, & of course the Konfabulator widget gallery. Top work, powerful tool.

So I'm changing the name of the article to "Konfabulator for Windows: Worth the hype?". Because with these two widgets its not a huge dissappointment, just not everything Ive seen advertised.

Yea, the polish of the widgets is the impressive thing.

The whole thing reminds me a bit of the console wars. Some consoles have more horse power than others but in the end it's about the games.

DesktopX widgets have lagged behind (until recently) Konfabulator in the polish category. Stardock's attitude has always been "throw the technology out there and let the skinners do their thang.."

Konfabulator's authors left nothing to chance, they released it along with a dozen or so really outstanding widgets.

Things are changing for DesktopX though. I honestly think there's no Konfabulator widget that can compete with the new Gadget Media Player: Link

Ed Voas stated this on Konfabulator's forum on Nov 9th...
(He is one of the lead developers of the Windows Version of Konfabulator)

"In fact, we are right in line with Desktop X. I verified this this AM. For example, I looked at the Desktop X digital clock widget, and it's private memory was 4MB. A more complex K widget, The Weather, took about 4.5MB of private memory. Private memory is the memory actually allocated by the process. The number you see in Task Manager is the amount of total memory used in RAM, but this is not memory that is necessarily used. This memory includes shared libraries, etc. that are linked and loaded on app launch. Typically, this amount of space is not stuff that's actually used more than once (bringup) if at all. When the OS needs more memory, it will page this memory out and reduce the working set of the application to just what's needed. But if you have a bunch of free RAM, it won't get paged. But you don't NEED it to get paged.

So for example, that same Desktop X widget showed me:

4MB private memory
2MB working set (this is what you'll see in Task Manager)
10MB max working set

Note that last number. Considering our smaller widgets take around that or less (larger ones take more - and the more images, then certainly that's more ram), you'll note that we are not that far off. The Weather showed:

4.5M private
12 MB working
12 MB max

The difference here is that we aren't calling anything to force us to page out. When I do that, I get:

4.5 MB private
2 MB working
12 MB max

You'll note that our working set looks about the same as desktop X. If i call this API to page ourselves out every minute, I can get our working set to about 400K, but at that point, you have to page your application in every time something interesting happens. Plus if you keep paging out, you'll keep the disk access hot, potentially stopping a portable's hard disk from spinning down. So clearly that's not desired. So what I did last night was try an approach to flush ourselves to disk after we load a widget, and I don't call it again. This allows the widget to keep what it truly needs to run resident and removes the cruft from RAM.

What I am saying is true in any paged VM system. Mac OS has the same deal. If you look in top on the Mac, you'll see that some apps seem to take up ungodly amounts of memory, but a lot of this ends up being shared memory, or memory that can be paged out, RPRIV in top is the only number that really matters... it's the amount of RAM the app actually allocated. As mentioned, that number on the PC is currently around 4-5MB. And as mentioned, that number is the same as Desktop X.

In short, my point is that Task Manager shows you typically everything the process needed to run unless you got so low on ram that it needed to page the application out. On my system, that number is 12M because I have 1.25G of RAM. If you have less RAM, I'd bet that number might be lower because its paged some of the app out. And like I said, we really (from empirical evidence) only need to keep around 2-3M in RAM max to keep the app responsive and not hitting the disk. I've already made that change so that people can feel better about what they see in Task Manager, but it's just an accounting illusion. But if it makes people feel better, so be it."

What do others think? I just an trying to debate on buying Konfabulator. I already am using Desktop X and have been for about 2 years, but have not had a good time with it, since it crashes alot for me. Errors with different widgets and problems with widgets looking funny on the screen. Konfabulator has be perfect for the first 24 hours of used. I like what I see so far.

He has incorporated the mem changes into the latest release, so it does look better in task manger.

If your anything like me, you'll use what suits you at the time and meets your requirements in either day to day use or a change of theme/style as the mood takes you.

I'm also a OD subscriber, but it hasn't stopped me from buying Konfab (owned it on the Mac anyway) for windows. Not because its better as such, but it gives me more choice which is what I like. As the app goes it as very stable. Mem usage is on a par (maybe a mb or two more) than DX and Kapsules, but its not as bad as it was.

Give them all a go. With Kapsules for example, you are basically getting a Windows native Konfab anyway. DX is definately improving also as they take on user feedback. The latest beta is very nice and thanks to Tiggz, Martin et al, the objects are also far better than they used to be.