14 DAY TRIAL // In the beginning there were little applications that did this and that. Then there was Konfabulator that made widgets into the phenomenon they are today. Then there was Dashboard and Konfabulator began to slowly fade away from the Mac. For those of us who have used Konfabulator and remember having a widget for everything, even the kitchen sink, Dashboard, despite all the cool effects and transitions, still has something missing. There were features in Konfabulator that did not make it into Dahsboard, and many miss them. This is why Amnesty was created.
What is it? Amnesty is a widget browser and launcher, that works with Dashboard widgets. Amnesty is a completely stand-alone program, not a Dashboard haxie of some sort. Now what this means, is that Panther users, who do not have Dashboard in their system, can still use widgets through Amnesty. Furthermore, Amnesty has a host of features that are simply not available in Dashboard.
Working with it When you install Amnesty, it places a menu on the menubar, which you can use to control the application. This menu holds all the widgets you currently have installed in Dashboard. Selecting any widget from it will open it in Amnesty. From here, the Widget works exactly the same way as it did in the Dashboard with one notable difference, you have control over it. Much like in Konfabulator, you can right click any widget and choose configure.
The Configure window, that pops of for all widgets, is split into two tabs. From the first tab, Window, you can change the opacity of the widget; set the desired level from either desktop, standard and floating; lock it in place and tell it to ignore mouse clicks. That's right, transparent, desktop widgets that ignore mouse clicks and are locked in place. If it only offered these options, Amnesty would have still been a must for all widget lovers, but there is more, much more. The second tab, Advanced, lets you specify the auto update interval, in minutes or hours, ranging from one minute to one day. This overrides the widget's own settings giving you a wider range of options for those pesky widgets that don't have the interval you need. Also in this tab, you can change the size of the widget, from 50% of the normal size to 150%, as well as rotate it by any value from 0 to 360.
Advanced features If you like widgets, you probably have downloaded a whole lot of them. If the Amnesty menu gets out of hand because of too many widgets, or you simple wish to keep everything ordered, you can create submenus to categorize widgets.
Furthermore, in case you want to have more widgets open than you have screen space for, Amnesty lets you define Layouts, which are basically the amnesty equivalent of Konspose and the Dashboard, the only difference is that you can have as many as you like. Furthermore, you can assign hotkeys to the layouts so you can easily change between them or hide them altogether. For each layout you can assign a background color or image, whose opacity can also be adjusted, so that your widgets become more visible and easier to read because of the contrast. Lastly, layers can be static or dynamic, static layers will always remain the way they were when you set them as being static, while dynamic ones will remember all the changes that occur, such as widgets closing or new ones opening.
In case you work with widgets that you have set to ignore mouse clicks, or a widget has somehow wound up beneath something and you cannot find a spot to grab it from and drag it out of there, you can use use the 'Bring Widgets to Front' command which automatically makes all widgets intractable with and brings them to the front so you can move them to a more appropriate location.
Because of the way that Dashboard works, many new widgets, especially the ones with constant animation are very resource intensive, because their creator presumed them to be running only when the Dashboard was visible. Since Amnesty lets you put these widgets on your desktop to be permanently visible for example, their resource consumption could get out of hand. In order to prevent this, Amnesty has a 'Run in reduced CPU consumption mode' which strives to keep these hungry widgets in check.
The Good Not only is this program the missing link between the Konfabulator and Dashboard, but it is also completely independent meaning that you will be able to use dashboard widgets even in pre-Tiger versions of OS X. Add to this the many advanced features and you have yourself one heck of a little widget application.
The Bad There is nothing to really put a finger on, except the price tag that is a bit peppered for the casual widget user, but for the avid widget devourer, this application is well worth the money.
The Truth If you miss features from Konfabulator that are not present in Dashboard, or just want the extra control, you can't go wrong with this little program. Also, for the non-Tiger users who want in the Dashboard widgety goodness, this application is what you have been waiting for.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
