The Goldfish Chronicles

I’ve been discovering the Konfabulator widget framework recently. Very nice, develop using XML and JavaScript, integrates nicely into OS X and a bit less to Windows, very good community built up. Commercial though, so hard to say if I’ll pay the N x 25 dollars, where N is the computers I’d want to run it on.

The Konfabulator product has been in-housed by Apple with their new Dashboard. It’s developed using extended HTML and JavaScript, which might make life a bit easier. Konfabulator’s absolute positioning is a pain in the arse. Also makes Safari the test environment.

I’d be all for Dashboard, but it doesn’t seem that you can attach your widgets to the desktop (think Active Desktop, but good). Konfabulator lets you do that on a Mac (though not on Windows) and it’s the killer feature for me. I want to always see all my monitoring widgets and not have to press a key or key-chord to see what’s going on.

That’s another killer feature that Dashboard sounds like it might not have. If I’m not in the Dashboard, the widget probably doesn’t run. I want a widget that not only periodically monitors something in the background, but then opens Safari or a dialog to tell me that something is wrong. Konfabulator looks like it could do that, Dashboard looks like it couldn’t.

Quite possibly, Apple have focused too hard on mimicing the basic functionality of Konfabulator and not enough on the power-features.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 12th, 2005 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.