More on Konfabulator

Now that it has come to light that Dashboard is actually a way to leverage Webkit to make little apps, rather than a custom runtime like Konfabulator, it becomes a lot more interesting as a platform. Anyone who can make an interesting webpage can make an interesting little widget. It also is a much more elegant solution than Konfabulator. The Fireballwrites about itand lays down the smack once again.

My reservations remain mostly the same. While the resource hogging of Konfab is gone ( so I can just ignore it rather than having to kill it), you still have a lot of functionality duplication, and a nebulous focus for the product. Seems like a solution without a problem. While there are a couple of things I would like to see as widgets, most of those are already implemented in some other way that I find just as convenient. Because I use a 20" cinema display, I have a lot of menu bar space to serve as a dashboard. I can have weather, CPU, network and disk usage, airport signal, battery life, all there all the time. Sure, they aren’t super pretty, but I don’t need them to be. I don’t want them to be. I just want the information in a way that is convenient, fast and easy to consume.

The way it sounds like dashboard was implemented seems really easy from a developer perspective, so I’m not angry that Apple is wasting resources on this. But I still think it’s going to make for a more confusing desktop environment. There are better ways to give people quick access to their information.

Posted by Joe Mullins at June 30, 2004 04:20 PM |TrackBack