Even after adding a bunch of RSS feeds, called Klips, KlipFolio takes up very little desktop space while still managing to be quite easy to interact with. KlipFolio runs on Windows 2000 or XP only, and is Windows profile-aware so each user on a shared system can have his or her own unique selection of Klips.

Interface

As soon as you download and install KlipFolio, it becomes abundantly clear that the theme of KlipFolio’s UI is minimal and efficient use of space. The display format of each Klip is highly customizable — when you first add a Klip, only a small title bar is visible. The title bar displays menu and expand/collapse buttons along with the name and icon of the Klip and the number of unread items.

By pressing the expand/collapse button (or simply passing the cursor over it), the Klip enlarges just enough to display a few lines of text — this may represent several recent posts or just one if it’s particularly verbose. Klips need not contain only text — they can include images as well. You can scroll through a Klip’s list of contents by holding down the mouse button and moving the mouse up and down, though this can be a fairly kludgey motion (especially in a small space) so a mouse with a scroll wheel works much better.

When you place the cursor over an Klip entry, it calls up a tooltips-style window with additional detail (the level of detail varies by Klip and the information source) or, in the case of lengthy items like news articles, a brief abstract or summary.

To view the entire source item you can click the Klip entry, which will launch it in a browser window. Ideally this would be a new browser window, but unfortunately KlipFolio chooses to commandeer any browser instance (and it doesn’t avail itself of tabbed browsers like FireFox).

There are myriad ways to customize the information a Klip displays to suit your specific needs. Most Klips let you filter their information by category, so for example if you are using a Klip that monitors currency fluctuations but only care about dollars, pounds, and euros, only those currencies will be shown.

Most Klips also let you configure alerts (in the form of a pop-up window or playing a sound) whenever a Klip has new or changed items, or items that contain a keyword you previously specified. There’s no way to configure (or even see) how often a Klip will refresh since that’s determined by the Klip author, but you can manually refresh individual Klips — or all of them at once — with a simple mouse click.

To add more Klips to your KlipFolio you can visit www.klipfarm.com, which at the time of this writing had a bit shy of 3,000 Klips in more than a dozen categories like Business and Finance, News, Tech & Internet, and Weblogs. In addition to browsing, you can also search for Klips by keyword — when you find a Klip you want, clicking a link automatically downloads and adds it to your KlipFolio for you. (As you add Klips, the title bars stack atop each other.)

In addition to the Klips that cull general information from the Internet there are many that can perform user-specific tasks, such as checking a POP or Webmail account for new messages; monitoring a local folder for file additions, deletions, or changes; or keeping tabs on eBay auctions in progress.

But while there are plenty of Klips to choose from, finding personally useful ones may not be as easy for some as it sounds. For example, a fair number of the available Klips are in languages other than English (German seems to be particularly prevalent). You can filter the listing by language, but you have to apply the filter again each time you choose a new category, which gets to be a hassle.

Helpfully, the site highlights about 50 “Editor’s Pick” Klips, many of which should have fairly broad appeal (like the New York Times, BBC, Google, etc.) If a Klip doesn’t exist for the RSS feed you’re interested in, you can create a generic Klip using the RSS link for the site, but your ability to customize it is limited.

Customizing and Organizing Klips

KlipFolio offers many options to arrange and manage a large number of Klips. If you want to have a specific Klip show more information at a glance you can set it to scroll automatically, or else widen or lengthen it by dragging it with the mouse. (When a Klip is made sufficiently large, it gets its own scroll bar.)

For Klips that you might reference less frequently, you can either leave them in their default title bar layout or shrink them down further so that only the icon (or as much of the title bar information as you choose) is visible. This lets you squeeze many individual Klips into a row, rather than just one.

In addition to the tweaks you can perform on individual Klips, you can also greatly personalize KlipFolio itself. Like just about every utility these days, KlipFolio is skinnable, and there are several choices available to customize the application’s look-and-feel.

You can also make global adjustments to specific visual elements like KlipFolio’s color and transparency level and font style and size. Non-aesthetic customization options include the ability to purge items after a defined period as well as automatically check for upgrades to KlipFolio and Klips.

Conclusion

KlipFolio’s minimalist interface takes some practice to get proficient with and is probably not for everyone. That said, the utility can offer a fairly unique and efficient way to manage the torrent of information from the Internet without overwhelming your desktop.

A fringe benefit is that KlipFolio is pretty light on resources — with the 14 clips we had running, the memory footprint was a mere 6MB, and CPU usage was negligible. Contrast this to a utility like Yahoo’s Widget Engine, where running lots of the graphically-rich widgets can eat up prodigious amounts of your desktop and available RAM.

At the moment, however, there seems to be more generally useful Widgets than Klips, so KlipFolio’s value will ultimately depend on your comfort with the interface and whether you can find Klips that provide the kind of information you’re looking for.

Pros: Highly customizable interface and efficient use of desktop space; can monitor dozens of different information streams in a relatively small space

Cons: Thousands of available Klips, but relatively few with broad appeal; clicking on articles takes over open browser windows