So I upgraded to Windows XP, in order to play with cool new things like Konfabulator and Yahoo Music Engine. I’m excited about the possibilities of Konfabulator, but most of what I’ve seen is too complicated to learn from in my preferred way — which is reverse engineering something that already works to figure out why it works. I know this isn’t the best way to learn, really, but it’s what works for me. What doesn’t work for me, and also a trend which needs to die: documentation only available in PDF.

I’m a bit miffed, as well, that the Picture Frame widget appears to do exactly what I want to do, displaying a random picture from my Flickr favorites, and yet I can’t use it because the Flickr API was just updated and the widget hasn’t been. I recently abandoned an obscenely complicated project to do this same thing as an Active Desktop channel, and to have the functionality right there, yet broken, is crazy frustrating.

Being a Launchcast Plus subscriber, I’m mostly looking for Yahoo Music Engine to be a better client for accessing my radio station. That it does, and it even allows plugins, so that the 60-90% of my music listening that I do via Launchcast can show up in my last.fm via this plugin (more plugins). I’m not thrilled that YME only takes music ratings on a four-star scale, particularly since all of my previous ratings are on the 100-point scale offered as an alternate by every other Launchcast client.

I didn’t expect to be impressed with Windows XP. As I mentioned, I only updated due to new applications which aren’t compatible with older versions of windows. I have to say, though, the sheer number of really annoying misfeatures is amazing. I can only imagine what Vista is going to be like.