Tech Goes Boom

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 Fireball writes about it and 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.