Konfabulator is great!

I have spent the eve­ning loo­king for a method of skin­ning iTu­nes for win­dows XP, I’m fed up of the grey scheme and would like the library to take more advan­tage of the cover art each of my music files has. I really wan­ted to browse by artist and beneath the artist there would be the album title and cover and to the right a trac­klis­ting / track details. This is what I want for iTu­nes and I haven’t yet found it. Howe­ver, on my trek across the inter­net I stum­bled upon Kon­fa­bu­la­tor 2, the sty­lish, sim­ple and effec­tive wid­get machine: 

I deci­ded to ins­tall and expe­ri­ment. Pre­viously I have used rain­me­ter and samu­rize clients to dis­play infor­ma­tion on my desk­top. Such clients have been slightly anno­ying to posi­tion, con­gi­fure and match with my current theme. Kon­fab’ comes with seve­ral pre­con­fi­gu­red wid­gets for you to use; an ana­lo­gue clock, CPU moni­tor, Wifi sig­nal moni­tor, weather fore­casts and various others. I used to have a weather add-on for Rain­me­ter yet the advan­ced con­fi­gu­ra­tion and work to find the local fore­cast code num­ber was not worth the hassle of the fore­cast only sho­wing every 3 reboots. So I tried this aspect first, I ente­red my home town and country and there it was, the fore­cast in all it’s sim­ple and bri­lliant glory, directly to my desk­top. It also shows the current stage of the moon’s cycle and puts tem­pe­ra­tu­res in a METRIC for­mat. Next up, time to browse the third-party wid­gets (http://​www​.wid​get​ga​llery​.com/).

Here I found an iTu­nes remote that looks like an empty cd jewel case. Upon pla­ying it shows the album cover in the ID3 tag, if not tag exists the wid­get searches Ama­zon for an appro­priate cover. Upon rolling over the top half a set of con­trols to change track, etc… appear, rolling over the bot­tom half brings up the pro­gress bar, track name and artist name. Sim­ple and elo­quent. It also has some advan­ced fea­tu­res such as hiding itself when iTu­nes is clo­sed, brin­ging itself to the front upon track change and hot­keys for con­trol. It also has three spea­rate sizes for album covers, in the screenshot below it’s on the middle set­ting. So here’s an image of my current desk­top, click for larger.