I’ve owned pzizz for a year and half now. I’m not a big user of pzizz - sometimes I’ll use it twice in a week to get to sleep, but then I’ll go months without thinking about it. In particular, middle-of-the-day “naps” are pretty rare. There was a time when I did sneak out to my car once or twice during work to see how that would go, but I don’t have a nap habit. Overall, I like it, but I’m a little concerned about some of the pseudo-science included in the product.

pzizz appealed to me because I have occasional fits of insomnia, and I’m also interested in taking sleep seriously. You can’t glean much about their product from their wikipedia page, but they’ve been enthusiastically endorsed by Merlin and Gina. The people who put pzizz together appear to share my enthusiasm for sleep, so I was happy to support their work.

It basically just generates audio files. They sell the modules that can generate either daytime “energy” naps or night-time “sleep” soundtracks for $30 each, but it’s $50 for both, and the authors don’t appear to want to branch out into new kinds of modules. The soundtracks, then, are mixes of music, effects, and a guy who talks gently. (We’ll get to the guy.) You don’t have a ton of options beyond how long the program is and the balance of background / guy. You can play the program immediately, export it to iTunes, or generate a file to be burned to CD. You’re supposed to listen to “energy” during the day (although I’m not sure if you’re supposed to actually sleep - there is an alarm at the end in case you do), or “sleep” as you fall asleep for the night.

The background noise is nice: pretty traditional relaxation stuff, with oceans, new-age synth melodies, and jungle noises. I’ve created soundtracks with no guy at all, and burned CDs for the kids. (They didn’t latch on to the idea.) The sound effects as the program goes on are less busy, and this is probably where the program uses brainwave entrainment - binaural beats, claimed by others to be useful in meditation, learning, boosting creativity, and relaxation. Others are skeptical. I imagine the effect is most pronounced if you’re using headphones with the primary audio source, but I’ve read elsewhere that the digital frequencies get all jumbled when the program is transferred to CD, so I’m sure the compression to MP3 ruins the magic, too. It is relaxing, and it’s nice that you can generate another mix when you get conditioned / bored with the one you burned.

My main issue might be the guy. I do find him relaxing: he says that things are really great, if they aren’t already, and reassures you that sleep is inevitable. That’s positive. But he also says things in kind of a stilted way, introducing pretty sensible observations with long-winded clauses that don’t necessarily put my mind at ease. Like, “it’s always a good idea to find a position for yourself that’s comfortable right now.” That’s a gentle, soothing way to say “get comfortable”, but it doesn’t make any sense. He also says things like “dreams are just dreams, they aren’t real…” which is, as far as I’m concerned, creepy.

Why does he go on like that? Because he’s trained in Neuro Linguistic Programming. NLP is another shadowy pseudo-scientific discovery, embraced by life coaches and self-helpers. (It’s about programming your brain with positive lanuguage patterns, but publicly available details about it get very sketchy / contradictory after that.) It’s possible, I suppose, that the people responsible for pzizz just thought NLP-tuned chat and encouragement would be pleasing in their product, but it’s certainly also a possibility that pzizz started its life as a method for delivering NLP-based self-help under the guise of taking more naps. It would be great if pzizz’s documentation or support site addressed any of this, but it doesn’t.

I don’t want to come across as a critic of pzizz. It’s a good product. I don’t want to say that binaural beats don’t encourage relaxation, sleep, or promote healthy brainwaves in the night, but I’m pretty skeptical about that. I’m very skeptical about NLP, and I’d love to know more about why pzizz is associated with it. And I worry that there’s not a discussion of these topics online, aside from the skeptical chat about the two separate features.

It was one of the few reasons I got interested in Macs in the first place: sure, iTunes is awesome on XP, but if I got a Mac, then I’d have a bunch of other like-minded applications that could work with iTunes.

And then it was one of the only reasons I was apprehensive about the MacBook Pro: I have about 50% MORE in iTunes gigabytes than the MacBook has hard drive space. And I’ll need some of that space for, y’know, the OS.

But I got the MacBook Pro, added a 160GB portable hard drive, and I was off and running. (Actually, I plugged it into a USB 1.1 hub, and wondered why the whole thing was so damn slow, but eventually figured out my problem.)

iTunes on Mac is nice because:

• It’s pretty zippy. My XP copy gets caught up on little laggy issues every once in a while, but I’m not sure if that’s memory or what.
• While it’s not quite what they promise you with “the lifestyle” on Macs, being able to pull actual iTunes playlists into random apps (like Apple’s presentation software, iDVD, Dashboard widgets, or even third party slide show software) is pretty close to magic.
• There are some killer AppleScripts that do really nice things. (I believe I’ve mentioned that one runs through your selection, cleaning up improper title case. That’s just one example.)
• pzizz talks directly to it, as does Handbrake, which meant DVD rips happen with about two clicks. Scary fast.

iTunes on Mac is pretty much exactly the same for:

• Working with iPods. I was really expecting to see some magic here, but it’s just as fast on XP, and just as easy.
• Large playlists. I was thinking that my thousands of songs might get sliced through a little more quickly, but no. Even Cover Flow is about as laggy on my Mac as on my PC.
• Purchasing / burning / etc. There are no additional barriers to buying, downloading, or burning anything on either platform. They’re basically identical.

iTunes on XP is better for:

• MusicBrainz. Jeez, there’s a Mac equivalent called iEatBrainz, and it’s really pushing the limits of “equivalent”. I had no end of problems with that software. MusicBrainz is a remarkably complete solution (and usually has correct title case, to boot)
• VolumeLogic. I paid for this plugin a long time ago: it adjusts the sound from iTunes and equalizes the volume. Easy enough, right? Well, the Intel Macs confound the developers of the app, so they haven’t released a version I can use on my MacBook. And it’s all a moot point now, because apparently 7.0 broke their implementation, and it doesn’t work for PCs now, either. (If you’re on 6, get Volume Logic. Seriously.)

So, in a fair fight, I think iTunes on Macs is a better app / experience than iTunes on PCs. But there’s one thing to consider: how light and portable the MacBook Pro is.

I don’t think twice about bringing my Mac anywhere: even if I’m pretty sure I’m not going to use it, it packs up so small that I don’t mind carrying it around. However, with the external hard drive connected, you have to remember to eject that before you go. Even if the Mac is sleeping, you have to wake it up, eject the disk (closing iTunes first, of course, unless you want all those hateful little exclamation points to tell you your music is missing), and then disconnect it. Then, when you’re on the road, you can’t use iTunes (all or most of your music is back on the detached HD, and even if you partition your music, you get those evil exclamation points). You have to come back and reconnect the drive before iTunes is an option again.

So I started noticing all this psychic inertia to not move the Mac, because I like iTunes to be running, or feeling like I was constantly connecting and reconnecting USB cables. That’s something I thought I was leaving behind. For all the advantages iTunes offers in a Mac environment, the problems of the laptop-two-disks scenario can’t overcome the ease-of-use offered by a desktop machine - PC or Mac - and the 24-7 docking / charging you’re probably pretty used to.

But: there no reason for this. Seriously. I spent a chunk of yesterday moving my iTunes installation back to my XP desktop. I mean, I really like using iTunes on the Mac, but I have too much music to really use iTunes on a MacBook. (Of course, now they come with enough room to store my whole library, and the next ones will probably have twice again as much room, but that’s the “buying from Apple” experience for you - as soon as you get it home, they’ve innovated yours into shame and ridicule.)

It’s freeing. There’s only one cable connected to my MacBook now: the power. When I want to take it somewhere, I’ll only have to shut it and go, not dismount the external drive (which I can use for backups now, I guess). When I want to dock an iPod, I won’t have to worry about if my Mac is where it’s supposed to be.

And the killer feature is that, thanks to what iTunes does over the network (playlist sharing), I can enjoy what’s on the PC’s iTunes with the Mac. (There are limitations: I can’t rate songs, my listens don’t bump the listen count, and I can’t edit song titles to correct their improper title case, but those are all my neuroses, and you shouldn’t have to worry about them.)

I thought I might detail “moving an iTunes library from one PC to another”, but I’ve already gone on at Scorcese-length about this one dumb thing, so I guess I’ll spare you for now.

A couple people have told me that they can’t believe I bought a Mac. (I’m still a little surprised by it myself some days.) I am not a raving evangelist, but people still ask me if I’m happy with OS X and how it works and stuff.

First: I am very happy with the Mac. If I think about why I’m happy, there is probably some tendency in me to say “I spent all this money and so I have to be happy - it would be a financial disaster for me not to be happy, therefore I am”. But I know my motivations pretty well, and I don’t think I’m justifying the risk I took by writing about it. (I have my suspicions about the people who are grilling me about it: most seem honestly curious about Macs, but a few seem more interested in how much it cost, why I felt okay spending that kind of money, etc.)

A couple people have said “so tell me one thing you really like about it - what’s so great about it?” Assuming they are asking that question for legitimate reasons, it’s hard to answer. If it were a debate, asking me to limit my lines of argument to one really good one would be a clever ploy, but I don’t want to argue with anyone about this: I like it, and you might not.

But here are three of the things I have said when people ask me to elaborate on Just One Thing.

Installing applications. This one is really big, and it’s kind of silly how great it is. When you download Mac applications, they (usually) come compressed. You open up the compressed disk image, and inside is a little documentation (maybe) and an Application file. You drag the app to Applications (some packages include a shortcut to your Applications folder, so you don’t have to pull that up), and you’re done. You can run it from there. Everything for the app is (usually) in the “bundle”, so installation doesn’t involve copying a ton of files all over everywhere, or setting registry stuff (the installer, not you)… it’s just all-in-one.

Huge apps don’t install like this. I’m not sure why. And you don’t have to put apps in your Applications directory (they’ll run, largely, from anywhere you put them), so some of that organization is just gentle recommendations, and you can clearly overcome it if you’re messy enough. Uninstalling an app should be as easy wiping the bundle from wherever you’ve put it, but running an app for the first time puts preference files in certain places, so if you want something really gone, I guess there are more steps than that, but I’m telling you: it’s something to overcome the new-app inertia that you get as a long time Windows user. I catch myself thinking “that looks like an interesting app, but I don’t want to try it only to have to wait forever for it to install itself, maybe reboot, definitely leave junk where I don’t want it, maybe install an icon on Christie’s desktop, and maybe never come completely clean” - and I remember, I can just give it a shot.

And even if the process of installing apps is 50% nicer instead of 500% nicer, think about disk images: there’s a standard disk image format that all Macs understand and (again, most) developers / publishers use. That is getting fairly geeky, but for the times when you want to send someone a folder, stash a collection of files somewhere, password protect a set of documents… it’s handy.

Quicksilver. Yeah, that’s usually the second thing I tell people. But it’s what sold me on Macs two years ago - reading Merlin Mann write about having everything about the computer at your fingertips, paying for AppRocket, and then reading for months about the feature gap between the two programs.

There is nothing, in truth, wrong with the Start menu. Good on Microsoft for keeping it around in their next thing. After about two months of adding programs in any version of Windows, though, I desperately needed to weed out a ton of stuff I didn’t need right there. After three months, I needed to look into alternatives: quick launch works for a while, that list of frequently launched programs is okay, I guess… and Vista even has some sort of something that lets you progressively search through programs or documents or something. That will be a big step.

But Quicksilver is ahead of everyone else in the user experience area. It’s not close. It lets you progressively search everything. Programs, documents, the insides of documents, online stuff. It lets you plug everything (text scraps, clipboard junk, images) into everything else (the ends of documents, your calendar, Flickr, etc.). It gets out of the way every time.

The gorgeousness. And this is where the argument gets all weird and subjective and I start to admit that of course you shouldn’t talk to me about it because I’m not thinking clearly because you’re obviously not thinking clearly because the whole thing is gorgeous and why don’t you just open your eyes?

It boots fast. It puts stuff where you can find it. It lays out security options in a way that you can actually make informed decisions (and feel like your wishes will actually be honored). It’s for grownups. It doesn’t fight you all day long, and when you’re not fighting all day long, you can get some other stuff done.

There’s a small pile of stuff it doesn’t do. You could take a principled stand and stick with Microsoft through all this, and I wouldn’t ever tell you you were wrong about it. But if you’re like-minded, and curious about this stuff, it’s really worked out well for me so far.

I’m using Mozy at home now.  It waits until you’re not using your computer and starts sending changesets to Mozy servers.  It’s free if you sign up for their goofy newsletter, which I do, and since I understand how to use mail filtering, I wouldn’t have to bother.  Still, I occasionally do.  It’s not the worst newsletter.

If you want to go beyond a certain number of gigabytes (I can’t even begin to backup my photo collection in their limit, to say nothing of my music collection), it’s a flat fee per month, but it’s a good bailout plan for free.  There’s another application by someone else, and they let you back up 1 gigabyte for every 10 gigabytes you sacrifice to them, but there again, we’re talking about giving up a terabyte to just get my MP3s safe.  (And my iPod does a theoretically good job with the most important 60GB, anyway.)

Another consideration would be FolderShare, and just sync up folders on extra PCs.  I don’t have a lot of problems with FolderShare, and if a couple of machines were ONLY backing up files, and not actually doing anything with them, I think it’d work okay.  All of these choices are passive, and passive backup systems are much, much more likely to be used than ones where you have to push a button.

If Firefox has a killer feature for hardcore web users*, it’s middle-clicking to get a new tab. On one hand, it’s a performance booster: if I see a link in the middle of a page that I’d like to visit, I middle-click it, sending it to the background, and when I’m done with the page (even a few seconds later), the clicked link is already loaded. This takes load time from 1-5 seconds down to actually, literally, nothing, and with nothing fancy on the optimization or network end: just a small change in my workflow.

On the other hand, though, it’s about much more than optimization. Sending middle clicked links to the background is a new paradigm in browsing: if a page offers, say, three links you’d like to click, you used to have to either a.) click the first, remember that you wanted to click back, and do so for each link, or b.) load each link in a new browser window, which I suppose some of you probably do. Tabbed browsing offers a huge advantage: clicking links on things you might only be curious in, and sending them to the background, you can review them without interrupting what you’re doing, and queue up several paths of exploration simultaneously.

I only bring this up because I hear that Firefox is changing the way tabs are closed: instead of one “close this tab” X in the upper right, there will be one on each individual tab. I don’t want to rush to judgement (particularly if this is an option, and it can be turned off), but I can’t imagine anything more disruptive to my way of working with Firefox. Flock had this, and I couldn’t even stand it long enough to see if the other features were worth my time (although, probably, they weren’t). When my attention tells me “okay, I’m done with this page”, there’s nothing more satifying than sending it away with a click of the X and seeing what else I’ve got queued under that tab. With Flock, my attention told me “okay, time to close this page” and then I had to determine which of the nine X icons I needed to click to get what I wanted.

Putting an X on every tab means that it’s back to me to determine what’s open and how to close it. It’s a tiny bit more burdensome to open a tab now, since there’s a tiny brain tax I have to pay to finish it off. The tab I’m on is suddenly something I have to keep track of, instead of something I can ignore. (Tab position is occasionally important to me, if I accidentally have two tabs open, and I’m trying to Alt-Tab between them, and I realize I have to Ctrl-Tab, and I give up and start indicating my choices with clicks. Otherwise, I’m not paying a lot of attention to the tab set I have open.)

It’s not that I don’t understand the usability problems posed by the single X. It doesn’t really indicate what it’s going to do when it’s clicked, and it’s certainly easy (before you “get it”) to close the browser, killing 10 tabs when you only meant to close one. But presenting 10 X icons for 10 tabs does not simplify the choices a novice user has to make to get handy with tabs. It’s intimidating.

How will I handle it if it’s the default in the next Firefox, and I can’t turn it off? I might adapt by using fewer tabs, or moving my tabs around so I’m more frequently wanting to click in a consistent spot (hmm, I’ll be reading this tab for a while, better move it all the way left so it’s ready for closing when I’m done)… at the same time, there is probably a keyboard shortcut for “close the tab I am currently looking at”, and that might suit my needs, as well.

For the time being… ugh. I wish they wouldn’t change it.

* The most important innovation of Firefox is probably the plugin architecture: any number of things are well done in Firefox, but if they aren’t, someone’s probably written code that snaps in, automatically, and does it better. And note that I only consider tabbed browsing a killer feature for information / interaction junkies like myself: I truly think about 80% of IE users don’t need anything more than IE.

I try out a lot of applications, and there are a bunch that I use all the time to make my computer life easier.  Some stand out more than others, but one that I’ve been using for about a year, almost without thinking about it, is FolderShare.  You point FolderShare to a folder you’d like to keep synced up on multiple machines, and if FolderShare is installed on those machines, it just does it.  It’s incredible.

(I should point out that a lot of solutions like this ask you to install an additional drive, or use some software to emulate a disk that you can write to, and the data’s actually sent to a central server.  FolderShare just gets pointed at a folder you already have, and as far as I can tell, no extra copies are made on any other servers, just the peers you tell it to sync to.  So that’s a level of complexity you don’t have to concern yourself with.)

I started out thinking that this would be a great way to use one installation of Firefox on my home PC, work PC, and laptop, but if you forget to shut down Firefox on one, you can’t use it on the others, because of the way it locks up files that are in use.  (That’s one case in which it does not “just work”: if you’re trying to delete a file that’s in use on another machine, it can get confused, but mostly it elegantly avoids doing anything that might cause problems.  That’s okay.)

I was able to get one copy of Miranda into a shared folder, but it’s got similar issues, so I scrapped that.

PWSafe, my favorite password storing app, works perfectly.  I now have pretty much random passwords for most of my important logins, and the file where I keep them follows me around.  (I think if you made changes to a safe, and didn’t close the app, and tried to run it somewhere else, you might get issues, but I try to shut that program down pretty quickly.)

It is technically a file sharing app, and that’s what it does best.  I have an mp3 directory in my shared directory, and I stash my downloads there, whichever machine I’m on, so I can process them later on my main machine with iTunes.  (They try to tell you that you could keep your whole MP3 collection in there, but I’m not sure how well that would work.)

I also have synced up a couple of my poker log directories, so hands I play on the laptop still get processed by PokerTracker.  Pretty handy.

I suppose the killer thing to do with it would be backup of documents, photos or mp3s, where, even if you have no intent of ever using the files on another machine, at least there’s another hard drive in the world that this content is stored on, just in case.  (Although, in my experience, most data loss is a result of human error, and FolderShare will happily distribute the damage you do to your filesystem across all the other versions of it.)

I don’t even think about it anymore.  If I will want a file on my laptop, workstation, or home PC the next time I sit down with it, I just store it in my shared directory.  It’s way more elegant than mailing stuff to yourself (no matter how great Gmail is), and it just works.  (Have I mentioned it just works?)

So, given that Christie had work (and at least $50 in un-backed-up iTunes music) on the hard drive, acknowledging (or even jumping to the conclusion) that the computer might be dead, dead-dead, unbootable from a CD or anything else-dead… was kind of sobering.  I didn’t have another computer I could put her drive in, and expect it to boot.  (I no longer open the machine Cratchit sold me: I’ve already nuked the BIOS and started one fire in there, and so all involved agree that it works fine the way it is.)

I thought it might be worth a shot to buy a USB hard drive enclosure, although I was pretty sure that Windows would identify it as a Windows drive that it didn’t have permissions on, and I’d have to maybe boot into one of those Linux CD systems that gleefully ignores NTFS permissions.  If that happened, hey, I’d still have that hard drive enclosure, and I have a spare drive, so bonus toys for me.  (Never call a hard drive enclosure a toy in front of Adam and Becky, by the way: they were markedly disappointed.)
But I digress.  Best Buy was all out of their $45 enclosures, but Circuit City had plenty of $35 ones, so Best Buy just lost a customer for life.  (Okay, 12 hours at least.)

The surgery was painless, and Windows did recognize the files on the drive.  I tried to open C:\Documents and Settings\Christie, and boom… it said “Access is denied”.  I googled around, and discovered that while Windows will respect the permissions that are already on there, it won’t prevent any admin from changing the permissions of any system.  So I can’t see it, but I can change the rule that says I can’t.  That makes no sense to me, but after 45 seconds Christie’s data was available to me.

I created a new profile for Christie, and copied all her data over.  Yay.

My laptop looks a little loney on her desk, and attaching it to a USB hard drive, her desktop sound system, and an iPod nano doesn’t make it seem any happier.  But it’s a solution that works for now.

The Tubbsitron KA, a computer I built with my own hands, and the machine I replaced just last year at this time, appears to be catatonic.  I gave it to Christie about six months ago, set her up with some speakers, loaded iTunes, put a photo of the Minnesota State Fair up as the wallpaper… good to go.  (In a house with four computers, it didn’t seem fair that she couldn’t have a little desk with one, for word processing or surfing or whatever.)

But, as she has reported, it went quiet on Wednesday, and didn’t want to wake up.  I immediately thought of the $50 I just gave her to spend at the iTunes Music Store, and how they’re unsympathetic if you spend $50 and don’t back up your files before a hard drive crash eats them.  (I haven’t backed up my files in about three months, but I do at least back up the ones I paid for… if that’s not too incriminating.)

When you turn it on, it beeps.  That’s never good.  The beep code persisted even when the hard drive was removed.  (I was so happy that the hard drive was not the problem.)  That beep code (long-short-short, or 1-2) indicates video problems (but all beep codes indicate video problems in one way or another: if the video was okay, it would write the error code to the screen).   I swapped out the video card: no luck.  I removed all the memory and reseated it.  Same code.

Now, I’ve noticed that the video card that was in there (a 4x AGP beast that Christie in no way needs for the Battlefield 1942 she doesn’t play) was not getting enough power to run the fan, but the replacement (an older AGP burner that Christie in no way needs for the Max Payne she doesn’t play) did have its fan going.  But neither card resolves the video issues.  So: problem with the power supply, or problem with the AGP bus?  Given infinite resources to get this machine back up and running, I suppose I would first swap out the power supply (just because it’s kind of making a funny sound, but I am getting very bad at telling where sounds are coming from these days), and then try to get another Gateway-branded six-year-old motherboard, so that the whole system could be transferred to the new motherboard, and I could spend the rest of my natural life chasing around those little screws and attaching case wires to jumpers I don’t understand.

Or, Christie could just borrow my laptop indefinitely.

I suppose if the Tubbsitron KA were the only computer in the house, I’d be a little more aggressive about repairing it, but I actually just got a USB hard drive enclosure from CompUSA and salvaged the data.  (More on this later.)  So, for the time being, that machine is pretty much dead, and Christie’s happily working on the laptop.  Still, we’re down to only three computers in the house…

Google’s been busy, busy, busy this week.  The most significant release was Google Talk, which is a pretty ho-hum chat client.  I haven’t used it’s Skype-like features, but I do appreciate the fact that multiple machines can be logged into the same Google Talk account, and that new messages are delivered to all logged in clients.  That’s an important feature to anyone who uses more than one machine (and there are a lot of us).

Second on the list of importance, I think, is the fact that you can now invite yourself to Gmail.  They’ll send an authorization code to any cell phone.  So the beta is pretty much over.

I ignored the new Google Desktop, just because I couldn’t really remember anything that I really liked about the first version.  Yeah, it searches your files, but I’ve got AppRocket for that, and I love it.  I didn’t really want my personal results comingled with my Google results, anyway: I wasn’t sure what to expect when I clicked, and I don’t like that.

But I saw that they’d added Outlook search, which is exactly what I’ve been loving about Gmail and angry about in my current office Outlook situation.  (In brief: I saw an email in the past few days about the office fridge being cleaned out, and then a bunch of stuff from the fridge appeared in my mini-fridge, and I wanted to check that fridge-cleaning mail, but I couldn’t remember who sent it or what the subject line was.) 

But the sidebar is the easiest win for this new version.  Let’s just go through what I like about it.

1. Internet-savvy panels include displaying photos from RSS feeds (goodbye Konfabulator widget), tiny weather (goodbye Konfabulator widget), tiny stocks (it’s okay, Konfabulator), and a tiny mail reader (that integrates Outlook and Gmail… if you’re into that).
2. A modified RSS reader automatically rips RSS feeds from the pages you visit, and puts together a "best of" based on what you visit most often.  This could be nothing short of the missing link in RSS feeds.  Everyone could use RSS, but few are ever going to go through the trouble of learning which sites have it, which don’t, and subscribing to the feeds that would minimize their information overload.  This app does it for you… automatically… correctly.  It’s smart.  It’s almost creepy, but it’s really okay once you get used to it.
3. An internet best-of panel, which just ranks the pages you visit most often.  Again, something that’s just cruising in the background, ready to help… I like it.

This may not topple the intercontinental communications infrastructure as we know it (like Google Talk might, if they can work those deals with VoIP providers and get real phone numbers hooked in, like Skype), but putting more information at my fingertips (and getting me to uninstall half of my Konfabulator widgets) is notable, too. 

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  Originally uploaded by Sudmanster.

I didn’t know Konfabulator existed for Windows.  I just knew about the widget concept, and that Apple had lifted it for Tiger, where it looks cool as hell.

But when Yahoo! bought the Konfabulator group last week, and made K free, I checked it out, and wow!  There’s a Windows version!

I was missing out.  I am probably as excited about this product as I have been about anything since podcasting or Bloglines.  It’s that cool.  The fact that Yahoo’s making it the cornerstone of its "developer community" is sort of vaguely exciting, I guess, until you look under the hood at these widgets, and find nothing but simple JavaScript, easily understood XML, and beautiful, beautiful PNG files.  In other words, your cat could develop for this platform, if s/he knew how to do drop shadows and jewel effects.  Otherwise your cat’s widgets would look crappy.

World Clock widgets for the time zones I work with (and one for Cratchit, of course) are completely unnecessary, but the Calendar / To-Do combo in Konfabulator has replaced Rainlendar for me, and I am slowly starting to trust the Gmail / Bloglines widgets instead of having to open FireFox whenever I need an information fix.  Good stuff.