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Konfabulator - A tool that can do nearly anything...
Authored by: bluehz on Mar 10, '03 12:02:15PM
Konfabulator is a fantastic technology with lots of potential. Right now the landscape is blotted with fairly useless eyecandy type Widgets, or simply reproductions of other applications. I suspect this will change soon and we will really start to see some very useful and unique Widgets showing up soon.

Konfabulator v.1.0 had a horrible memory leak to it, but it has since been fixed in v1.0.2 as far as I can tell in my testing.

Here's a tip I picked up that I use when I run Konfabulator. The menubar menu is not required to run Konfabulator and for me its just another item in my crowded menubar. I have lots if menuabr items that are essential and I prefer to limit these items to only the essentials so I like to get rid of the Konfabulator menubar item. You can still launch any Widget by simply double-clicking the Widget itself - assuming you have previously started Konfabulator. Here's a short shell script I picked up that will launch Konfabulator and then remove the menubar item, leaving Konfabulator running and available for Widgets.

#!/bin/sh

# launch Konfabulator
# replace /path/to with the correct path for your setup
open -a /path/to/Konfabulator.app

# wait for Konfabulator to fully launch and show the
# menubar item
sleep 5

# remove the menubar item, leaving Konfabulator
# engine running - should be all on one line
kill `ps -wwwxo stime,pid,command | grep onfa | grep ps | grep -v grep | grep -v -- '--child' | sort -r | awk '{print $2}' | head -1`
there is also an Applescript version I found but have not tried it myself.
tell application "Finder" 
   open item "Konfabulator" of folder "Applications" 
   delay 5 -- or whatever you want 
end tell 
try 
   do shell script "ps -wwwxo stime,pid,command | grep onfa | grep ps | grep -v grep | grep -v -- '--child' | sort -r | awk '{print $2}' | head -1" 
   set kill_me to result as text 
   do shell script "kill " & kill_me 
end try


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Konfabulator - A tool that can do nearly anything...
Authored by: bluehz on Mar 10, '03 01:07:02PM

Apparently the above technique no longer works in Konfabulator 1.0.2. If you quit the menu you are unable to launch any widgets. Anyone have a workaround?



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The reason this doesn't work...
Authored by: daveschroeder on Mar 10, '03 02:21:10PM

The reason this doesn't work anymore, as I'm sure you're aware, was that the nag window that comes up with an unregistered version of Konfabulator was a child of the menu extra process. If you kill the menubar item, the nag window is also killed. This script was originally callled "Konfabulator Killer" and was specifically designed for those who wanted to pirate Konfabulator without paying for it.

I won't pass judgment on the above poster personally, but that's probably why it no longer works...



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