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Konfabulator: Whatever You Want It To Be
Squidgee writes "Arlo Rose, one of the developers who worked on Kaleidoscope, and the ill fated Eazel desktop environment for Linux, has come out with another potentially Mac-shaking app: Konfabulator. Konfabulator lets you run any program written in XML/Applescript/Javascript (It's own little hybrid of all three) in its engine, seamlessly placing the app onto your desktop. Examples of such apps are: A CPU Monitor, a Multi-Clipboard tool, a weather monitor, a battery monitor, etc. It allows for easy developement, beautiful apps, and unlimited functionality."
To me, it sounds a bit more like what Mozilla is trying to do, but on one platform instead of all of them (basically). And I have to say that the whole concept appeals to me, anything that makes creating interesting little apps easier seems like a Good Thing to me. True, it doesn't feel all that earth-shattering, but that's really down to what people do with it, and how many people that start doing it. The examples noted in the journal seem very promising. In all, the only downside I can see is that I still don't have a Mac of my own to try this out on :-) ...
... creative? Interesting concept ...
Someone using this to help trolls? You mean, like trolls being
I can save most people the trouble of checking out the site.
1/2 the widgets are clocks.
1/3 of the widgets are newsreaders.
The rest are silly widgets that do nothing but take up space.
All of them are HUGE and take up tons of desktop space.
If you want to check their forums, I can save you that trouble also. 1/2 the posts are people having orgasms over the product and 1/3 of the people are complaining about the price.
Right now the widgets don't do anything that menu items or docklets do much better.
Woo. Active Desktop comes to the Mac about four years after everyone decided it was pretty much useless. Oh well, I guess some people will really like to fool with it and say how great and superior it is to active desktop even though it is the same exact fucking thing. I made lots of little Active Desktop widgets at one point that are now lost to the annals of time I suppose. It was fun while it lasted.
~GoRK
I spent an hour making a remote for XMMS running in X11. Most of the time was spent en Photoshop doing the GUI, wich now sits nice an quiet and unobtrusive in the topright corner, half translucent and floating over my other windows.
;)
As it is now, I can quickly convert the widget to, say, control iTunes on another box on my network, or iTunes on my own box. And I think that most other apps that can be controlled via either Applescript or the terminal can be controlled with a widget.
I dont knwo about you, but Ive always wanted a more simpel remote formy television and stereo. Now I can at least get simple remotes for most of my apps.
Oh, and most of my websites too
This is an excellent app. As a designer i've dipped my toes in several programming languages , always planning an app to increase my productivity in specific ways. This is a very sweet development environment for a person in my position. It also satisfies a need to develop & distribute gorgeous Aqua interfaces for little apps that manage everyday data. I guess that's really the point...
now all we need is a slashdot headlines widget! i think that would make my world complete. m@
So if this tool allows them to easily whip up things like server or load monitors, then it's a good thing. Of course, we don't use Macs though :), which is why the title of my post is what it is. I'm going to take a quick skim through the site and see if there's any potential (stated or implied) that says that the engine could be ported to traditional Xwindow, which would make it the most generic for them.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Interestingly enough, webcams are the only thing that adorned my Active Desktop space for the longest amount of time. After a while the resources running Active Desktop weren't worth it.
Take a look at this crap to see a rather extreme example of Active Desktop.
Well, you used about as much time on the commands as I did. As I said, most of the time was spend doing the GUI.
;) And its limited how many commands you can put on a keyboard, let alone remember. Some of the widgets you dont even have to do anything to, other than look at the gui. I know the weather widget is kinda stupid, you could look out the window. (Then again, if youre looking at the screen, why waste precious pico-seconds looking away? ;) ) But, as you say your GKrellM do, it convays information at a glance, as can Konfabulator be made to. In just the way you want. If you dont like the look, change it. Make it do something more. With javascript, applescript and shellscripting Im hard pressed to think up something you cant do with it. :)
;)
What people prefer to use, key/mouseclick, is up to them. I prefer the mouse for this kind of opereation as my left hand ususally supports my head
personally I would have prefered PHP instead of javascript, but thats just me being a PHP-developer
"A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words" someone once said, and I think he/she was right. It is faster to look at a smiling sun than read the "Partly Cloudy" that a bash script would output. You wont even have to look directly at the picture, just kinda "theres something yellowish up in the corner of the screen... The sun must be shining outside".
Anyway, I like konfabulator and think its a great app. You would almost think I worked for them by the way I defend it here
Really? To me, the "value" of Konfabulator is $25, not in what I or others can create for it. (Yes, I'm aware that $25 is the price, not the value, just playing with words to make a point.) If everything it comes with is inherently useless, I have no inspiration to do anything cool with it, hence it has no value to me. The included widgets ARE lame, although some of the third-party widgets I've seen are relatively impressive.
Granted, this comes from someone who is fairly fluent in bash, AppleScript, C, and Objective-C, so virtually anything that Konfabulator can offer now or in the future, I can make myself, and it will probably perform better. Of course it might take me a little longer...
I have recently been on a shareware-purchasing binge (I spent nearly $200 before I realized I need to pay my bills first!), and I really wanted to like Konfabulator. Unfortunately, the following things (in order of priority) made me decide to trash it and not give it another look for quite a while:
1. You get ONE launch, and then the shareware reminder is permenantly on your desktop. Nag screens, timers, trialware, quitting after an hour, hell even a faint watermark would all have been acceptable. About the only think worse than that sort of perma-shareware-reminder window is bonafide spyware.
2. It really feels to me that Arlo Rose et al are trying to take advantage of both the ease of development in Cocoa and the untapped creative energy of the Mac community. I could be totally wrong about this, but the less work they do, the more the community will do, and they will get paid the same no matter what. I hope the Konfabulator license allows one to retain all legal rights to their creation, including being able to sell it for exhorbitant amounts of cash, if they should so choose.
3. This is a minor peeve, but still valid, IMHO. Why JavaScript? AppleScript makes much better glue, and would make it very easy for widgets themselves to be highly scriptable and customizable. The syntax is even easier than JavaScript, and enables you to tap into a wide variety of OS X services natively without having to code even more glue between the scripting language and the OS. AppleScript just seems like a much better choice for a Mac OS X-only "widget factory". Hell, you could even have widgets that know how to create other widgets on the fly from user input. Oh well.
Like I said, I really wanted to like it. Maybe 1.1 will blow my mind.
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
I downloaded and then paid for Kofab last week, as did a couple friends.
I really like it and there are starting to be some really neat Widgets.
PowerMate Battery widget so far is the neatest one. Have a PowerMate, hook it to the Powerbook and use the widget to have the PowerMate tell you how charged the battery is as it sits over on it's CoolPad and recharges.
Cool stuff.