Hero Inc.

where heroes are an everyday occurrence

Jun-1-2008

Widgets, Widgets, Widgets

Sure Windows and Mac have Widgets, but what is a widget. Wikipedia defines a widget in many different ways. However, in the computer world, a widget is “a component of a graphical user interface with which a user interacts.” In other words, something really cool to stick on my desktop to provide different types of information. Some of the most common widgets are for weather, time, system monitoring and etc.

With Super Karamba, my desktop has come to life with widgets. Due to the speed of my current system, I’ve kept the widgets to a minimum and I am happy with my three main widgets and one substitute widget. These widgets include:

  • Liquid Weather ++ => This widget is a weather widget designed to provided updated information concerning weather in a particular area or many areas. It can also provide weather maps for upcoming storms and web cams for different views around your area. You will of course need to provide the addresses for the web cams, but that isn’t too difficult to find.
  • A-Foto => This widget is probably my favorite of my list. This one provides a wonderful picture frame of pictures based on a folder location. I find myself leaving my desktop clear so that I can see this particular widget.
  • R-Monitor-SE ENGLISH => This widget provides up to the minute system information for monitoring purposes. I was happy with this widget from the start, but then I realized how easily I could modify the widget to look how I wanted it to look and I grew to love it even more. Now it matches my website (Hero Inc.) and personality. The link for the widget will show you how the widget looked prior to my alterations being made.
  • cdKase Amarok => It’s always great to display album art if you have it. This widget provides a casing for the album art and Amarok controls on the desktop. However, I vary rarely use my desktop to control Amarok. It does look great though.

All of my widgets were found through kde-look. If anyone knows some other great widgets I should check out, please let me know.

Posted under Linux

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