Once More... a farce in many parts. A comedy in others.

My first Konfabulator widget: XPCalReplace.

Posted on August 27th, 2005

My first Konfabulator widget: XPCalReplace. What it does is pretty well illustrated in the image at right. Once you place the widget on the screen correctly, it should blend in seamlessly with Win XP, replacing the windows clock in the system tray. You’ll first have to go into the widget preferences and set ‘window level’ to Topmost. If you notice it disappearing behind the standard windows clock at times, you also may have to go into the taskbar properties and uncheck “keep the taskbar on top of other windows.”

Pretty simple, really, but one thing I’ve learned is that all this is not as easy as it looks. I’m hoping to make improvements as I learn more. By the by, I mainly wrote this as a replacement for the handy utility TClockEx after upgrading to XP. TClockEx is much more configurable, and will run under XP, but doesn’t exactly blend in (can be read as: it’s dog-ugly).

Update 28 August: I fixed a fairly major bug regarding AM vs PM. Don’t know how I didn’t catch that before now. Oh, look over there! Shiny things!
29 August: Now comes loaded with several themes for XP and XP Media Center, as well as clear backgrounds if you want to use it somewhere else on your desktop. If you still don’t see something that matches the look of your taskbar, drop me a line.

3 Responses to 'My first Konfabulator widget: XPCalReplace.'

Track rss feed: replies to this post.

  1. Mark said, on August 29th, 2005 at 11:58 am

    Any chance of getting different background images or font colors for the widget? It doesn’t seem to fit my current (XP-Media Center Edition) theme:
    http://michaelhusson.com/mark/temp/tray.jpg

  2. jrhyley said, on August 29th, 2005 at 12:08 pm

    Once I manage to get a handle on how preferences work, I had hoped to add a selection of different background images to match as many of the default themes in XP as possible. Don’t have access to media center, though. Could you send me capture of what the tray usually looks like?

    This goes the same for anybody running any other version of konfabulator-ready windows or a theme that doesn’t come by default with XP Pro. (Don’t see much point making it work on Macs, since a similar functionality is built into the OS.)

  3. Mark said, on August 29th, 2005 at 2:04 pm

    sure thing

Leave a Reply