neurological dryer lint

i have a confession: i am intensely vulnerable to eye candy. one of the things that has actually gotten me to consider giving a mac a try has been the osx dashboard... in fact i would say that my dream OS environment would be a web browser and word processor and everything else (media player, messaging client, mail, calendar, etc) would run in small gadget applications.

however my experience with osx's dashboard is the same as i had with the only viable windows version, konfabulator. i tried konfabulator a while back and i found that loading the background app engine used almost all available memory and CPU time and that i couldn't get much else loaded. so i gave up.

things have evidently improved, though - yahoo acquired konfabulator and now offers the app as yahoo widgets. so i figured i'd give it another shot... and it's much improved, using almost no system resources. excellent! comes with some very useful apps - moreso if you're actually an avid yahoo service user (mail, calendar, flickr, etc).

unfortunately osx's dashboard seems to still be dog slow unless you've seriously beefed up your mac.

google recently modified their personalized homepage site to allow the addition of their own widgets. nothing incredibly stunning yet. google desktop has some web-service-integrated pieces - however they're simply panels in a sidebar, nothing visually stunning. in other words, y'all need to catch up. gimme a gmail widget, one for google maps, one for froogle searches, google talk, an rss reader, a notepad, a blogger app...