10.4 Widget Site Opens Doors

sammykrupa writes "My new venture has just opened its doors. Dashboard Lineup is a site where developers can talk about the OS X Tiger widgets they are developing and and tips and tricks can be exchanged. There are also discussions about ideas for widgets. It's also worth mentioning that if you are a developer you can use the free hosting for widgets I have set up."

Comments

What about the other Dashboard sites?

[vocaro]

This "news item" sounds a bit like a thinly veiled advertisement for the submitter's site. Why no mention of the other Dashboard sites that have sprung up recently, like Dashboard Exchange and DashboardWidgets?

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[TripMaster Monkey]

You beat me to it...another advert posing as a story.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[Golias]

Going back to the release of Kornfabulator... I'm still waiting for a widget of this sort which is even a tiny bit useful to me ever.

Floating clocks and weather forcasts? WTF?

Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

or not so thinly veiled

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[mipod]

Yeah, honestly... there have been a bunch of Dashboard sites around for a while, The Dashboard was created a few days after DB was announced. Being innovative would be far more worthy of a slashdot post, rather than coming out with a crappy looking site 9 months late.

If you want to see a nice one, though, look at DashboardWidgets. Lotsa widgets up already...

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[DavidLeblond]

Why no mention of the other Dashboard sites that have sprung up recently

Why, because they haven't submitted their stories to Slashdot. ;)

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[greed]

It wasn't thinly veiled: "My new venture has just opened its doors."

Doesn't get much more blatant than that.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[andreMA]

Floating clocks and weather forcasts? WTF?

Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

For you, at this point, perhaps not. Stock quotes and realtime airline flight tracking are also commonly mentioned as Dashboard uses, as are currency converters, calculators, webcam monitors, whatnot. I suspect that many people will find one or more of these quite useful; if you don't then that's fine: don't use them.

Personally like the notion of having a hide-able layer; others may prefer a 3rd party solution to do virtual desktops in OS X to contain these minor items - something that I personally don't care for. Dashboard is just another option; take it or leave it.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[FidelCatsro]

The usefullness all depends on what your doing ,
If im at home and want to keep an eye on my stocks but not leave a browser window open or if im doing some accounting and want quick access to a caclulator that is easy to wip out and throw away.
How about i would like to check my emails quickly and easily then that can eassily be accomidated too or perhaps a quick reference dictionary.
What about a rather nice library reference tool(For C code or Objective C or etc) that could search a database depending on a word you have in the clipboard so you can see what a function or a class or blah is for without taking up perminant screen space
Yes it is a toy , yes other things can do these tasks equally well but non of these things are normaly lumped together and wont function in the same fashion as dashboard. Honestly its one of these things you do not need till you use it ,, then its a pain to do without.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[KillerDeathRobot]

Floating clocks and weather forcasts? WTF?

Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

Yeah, who ever needs to know the time or what it's like outside??

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[andreMA]

Honestly its one of these things you do not need till you use it ,, then its a pain to do without

Kinda like what they did to me with Expose, to which I was very lukewarm until I spent a few days using it. Damn, you, Apple!

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[FidelCatsro]

Couldnt agree more , I find myself subconsiously hitting my hotkeys for "show all open windows" on fluxbox . .. on that note.
Does anyone know an implementation of this for the FreeDesktop(honestly i dont care which ,it is enough for me to switch to nearly any windows manager or desktop enviroment)

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, who ever needs to know the time or what it's like outside??

The time: Look at the upper-right of the screen, where there is already a time display.

What it's like outside: Look out a window. You know, that big glass pane on one wall of your boss's office?

Anything else to say?

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[intmainvoid]

Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

and is it really the killer feature that should be on the apple homepage?

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[KillerDeathRobot]

The time: Look at the upper-right of the screen, where there is already a time display.

Lots of people prefer an analog display to a digital one for telling time. I'll agree that a clock isn't super-necessary, but if you don't want it, you can easily turn it off.

What it's like outside: Look out a window. You know, that big glass pane on one wall of your boss's office?

Oh yes, because looking out a window will tell you the temperature and the chance of precipitation later. On top of that, everyone obviously has a huge window right near their computer.

Anything else to say?

Yes: It's hard to believe that you can't see the benefits of the various widgets on the dashboard. Maybe you personally don't have a whole lot of use for two particular ones, but there are tons more and furthermore they're easy to develop (HTML and CSS) and thus there will likely be lots of novel ones. Take second to look outside (no pun intended) your narrow little world and see that everyone is not you.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[Zork the Almighty]

Personally, I'm only really interested in the dictionary and thesaurus. Dashboard will be great for people who would like the benefits of having lots of crap available instantly, but can't stand to clutter their workspace.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[Golias]

For you, at this point, perhaps not.

God, I love a straight answer to a straight question. It seems so rare these days.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[gobbo]

Floating clocks and weather forcasts? WTF?... Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

Yes, really. I get to work in the morning and bring up Konfabulator with a hot key, and while I'm unloading my bag I can glance at a big clock and calendar on the screen from across the room, then sit down and get the weather forecast so I can plan field work (no windows!), check the ferry lineup in the webcam frame, glance over my iCal to-do list, note any active network connections as well as network & cpu loads, and check a couple of RSS feeds. On one screen, with one key. Then it goes away with one key.

Yes, I think Konfabulator is worth it, even for the ridiculous load it puts on an old processor. It saves a huge amount of time and after a few years, I'm addicted. Between using Konf and Quicksilver I've been sampling the gui of the future. But, it was just a warm-up to Dashboard, as far as I'm concerned. I think the free widget community is going to come up with some very interesting uses.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[Yer Mom]

I use the Konfabulator phase-of-moon widget to know when it's time to play Nethack.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[tbone1]

You beat me to it...another advert posing as a story.

Hm, sounds like slashdot was bought by Gannett.

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[Golias]

I think the free widget community is going to come up with some very interesting uses.

What bugs me about that prediction is that Konf has been around a while now. If the "free widget community" (if there is such a thing) was going to come up with some very interesting uses, wouldn't they have done so by now?

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[MoneyT]

Probably not. As nice and K has been for some people, a lot of people don't like it (like myself) due to the loads that it constantly puts on the system. If I remember my time playing with the old Tiger beta right, the loads dashboard puts on the system are considerably less when it's hidden. That in and of itself should generate more demand, and more developers. Plus, K is only javascript, Dashboard is the entire webkit backend and then some. More flexibility == more / better ideas

Re:What about the other Dashboard sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhh!

We are all supposed to think that Dashboard is a direct rip-off of Konfabulator, because it looks a bit like it.

If you go telling people it's actually a superior product which happens to accomplish a similar task, you'll challenge people's religious belief that really great software can only come from the Open Source community.

Knock it off, heathen!

From TFA

[Elwood P Dowd]

Widgets Idea Roundup
...
5. A stupid liberal zapper.

Eh... fuck you. You win; your advertisement worked; I'll never look at your page again. Zap away.

Re:From TFA

[ERJ]

Man, you sure don't have a sense of humor...and also some pretty selective vision.

3.A Stupid Republican Quote Widget.

Re:From TFA

[njfuzzy]

Er. Note that his list comes from user discussion. That one was probably in response to "stupid republican quotes widget".

Re:From TFA

[mmkkbb]

Did you not see #3?

"3. A Stupid Republican Quote Widget."

At least he's got someone for 95% of the American audience.

Re:From TFA

[Yjerkle]

5. A stupid liberal zapper.

Eh... fuck you. You win; your advertisement worked; I'll never look at your page again. Zap away.


It's hard to be sure, but I'd bet this was in response to:

3. A Stupid Republican Quote Widget.

Re:From TFA

[Elwood P Dowd]

Uh, yeah. I'm a jackass.

You win, though: first of five to point it out.

Re:From TFA

[FidelCatsro]

its always funny if your not on the reciving end ;)

Re:From TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yeah. I'm a jackass.

An invitation to an "Insightful" moderation, and I have no points...

Re:From TFA

[Elwood P Dowd]

While someone's out there modding up my original bullshit. C'mon, mods, pay attention. I wish you could downmod your own posts with impunity.

Re:From TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Although seriously I do make such moderations when the poster was originally sincere, took the time to engage in actual discussion, learned something and politely thanked the other party.

Grace in losing an argument deserves a reward too; it's not all "being right"

Re:From TFA

[milkman_matt]

Re:From TFA (Score:1)
by FidelCatsro (861135) on Thursday April 14, @01:58PM (#12238380)

its always funny if your not on the reciving end ;)


Now THIS, I found as even FUNNIER!

Re:From TFA

[b-baggins]

Which is silly. We all know the actual liberal widget is the debate tactic widget. It has a crosshair for aiming and a button labeled: Throw food. It's best used to show the intellectual superiority of liberals when debating conservative speakers on college campuses.

Re:From TFA

[chasingporsches]

i can not believe that this turned into an effing liberal/conservative discussion. both sides are retarded. face the facts.

This one has been around for years...

[profet]

http://www.konfabulator.com

Re:This one has been around for years...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I tried Konfabulator, as did a number of people I know. For me I stopped using it because it was a hog, and just slowed down my machine too much. The lack of compelling/really useful widgets was a problem. A friend of mine summed it up with, "When the demo expired and I had to consider paying for it, I had already stopped using it, so I just deleted it." That was basically it for a lot of us. It just was not very useful. Dashboard looks to be more so. And it is free, so even if I only book a flight once a year, or look up a phone number in the yellow pages once a week, there is no reason not to have it.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Kinda like Sherlock. The only useful feature of it, for me, is the Movie Showtimes--saves me from having to dig through the paper, plus I get a preview. But the once every two months that I consider going to a movie are the ONLY times Sherlock gets used. Especially since the Sherlocker site shut down; I don't know of anyone trying to extend Sherlock anymore. Which means we're left with the Find Flights etc

Really, why use this stuff when it's just a link away? Does anyone find it easier to launch Sherlock and type their google search into Sherlock, or to just go to google directly with the browser that they already likely have open? Same for Dictionary.com.
To sum: what makes the movie button useful is that it's an aggregator of several sites; but most of the buttons simply replicate an existing site. We need more aggregators, and less purely redundant buttons.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[Professor S. Brown]

Konfabulator clutters up my desktop with shite. Dashboard does not. That is why I will be using Dashboard, and not Konfabulator. Do you see?

Re:This one has been around for years...

[Zhe Mappel]

The lack of compelling/really useful widgets was a problem.

Oh, for the lurva Pete!

I don't happen to care much for Konfabulator, but there are nearly 1,000 widgets for it. They cover every single thing Apple is scraping together for Dashboard. And you can be sure nearly everything to be "invented" for Dashboard later will already have been Konfabulated.

It just was not very useful. Dashboard looks to be more so.

Er, yeah. They both work the same way and do the same thing.

And it is free, so

It's $129, Sonny Jim.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[Trillan]

I paid for Konfabulator. It hasn't been updated this year, and crashes frequently. It's also a rsource hog.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I don't happen to care much for Konfabulator, but there are nearly 1,000 widgets for it.

There were not 1000 when I first tried using it. 50 Maybe 100. And very few of them did anything I was not already doing with a stand alone application or was faster just to look up with my web browser.

Er, yeah. They both work the same way and do the same thing.

Hopefully not, or I'll not use dashboard. Konfabulator was eating half of one of my cpus and a good chunk of memory while sitting idle, with only a few widgets installed. Also, there is something to be said for calling it up and hiding all other applications with a single command, then reversing the process with the same command. The same thing could probably be done with a konfabulator and a script, but I'm a lazy, lazy man.

It's $129, Sonny Jim.

Not really. With an educational discount it is $69. And I am not paying $69 for dashboard. I'm paying $69 for improved Cisco VPN support and spotlight. Dashboard, Automater, etc. are things I would probably not buy, but sure don't mind trying out for free.

Basically, I tried Konfabulator, but found it unacceptably slow. Many friends of mine tried it, and according to their reports, it did not get much better. I did not see the value proposition in either money or system resources to running it. I'm hoping that Dashboard (for no extra money I was not already spending) and an as yet unknown system resources cost, will provide a better value. I will find out in a few weeks.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[WasterDave]

I stopped using it because it was a hog, and just slowed down my machine too much.

Dashboard is entirely webkit with JavaScript, it's going to eat CPU power like there's no tomorrow. I'm wondering what was wrong with just writing applications, but I'm obviously in the minority.

Dave

Re:This one has been around for years...

[rjung2k]

My biggest beef with Konfabulator was that the widgets were always on the screen. If you don't have a fat display, using any part of it for stuff you access infrequently is wasteful. At least Dashboard lets me stow everything away and bring it out only when I need it.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[b-baggins]

Er, yeah. They both work the same way and do the same thing.

Not even close. The technology is completely different.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[gobbo]

That's been fixed for a while. F8 is Konfabulator's friend now, and they stay out of the way.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

That's been fixed for a while. F8 is Konfabulator's friend now, and they stay out of the way.

There is a problem with Konfabulator's marketing exposed by your comment. I did not know Konfabulator had fixed that problem either. I tossed it early on, because it was just not good enough, or useful enough. Now it is probably better in a number of ways, but I am certainly not motivated to download it again and try it out again. The demo expired in a month and for people like me who often test out new usability applications that means within the first few months of it being offered. The developers should have had a longer beta release available to anyone. As it is a lot of us gave up on it, when we were asked to pay because at the time it was not worth it, and I'd wager most of us never went back to see if Konfabulator ever became useful. Maybe they just could not afford it. Too bad guys, better luck next time.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[DavidLeblond]

Try going to Google and typing movie:##### (where ##### is your zipcode)

Thats how I search for movie showtimes now :)

Re:This one has been around for years...

[MoneyT]

From what I recall from playing with the Tiger beta oh so long ago, dashboard is fairly light wieght while it's hidden. Of course, when you bring it forward, the CPU load goes up considerably, but when it's in the background, it's fairly nice to the CPU.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[Erasei]

Dashboard looks to be more so

I did pretty much the same thing. Grabbed a copy when it first came out, downloaded a heckuva lot of widgets, opened em all up and drooled at the eye candy. Then I noticed my system was dogging and I didn't really find them all useful.

But instead of blaming the software, I thought about it and maybe it was the way I was using it that was causing the problem. Two things have happened that make Konfab my 2nd most needed app (second only to Adium, www.adiumx.com).

#1: Arlo and Perry released Konfab 2.0. MUCH speedier and lighter weight on resources. Night and day difference from the first release. I used to run 5 or 6 widgets on my old ibook 600mhz without any sluggishness.

#2 I learned to use it the way it was designed to be used. I'm not saying you can't run 100 widgets, but I don't think Arlo meant for that to be the default case when he designed Konfab.

I run 4 widgets all the time, and various others when I need them. Widgets in use all the time:

miniWeather: A small footprint version of The Weather. Has a small graphic of current conditions and the temp.

DateTime: A widget that I wrote that shows the date and time like: Friday April 15, 2005 10:56am It sits right above my dock.

DropImage: Another widget that I wrote that will take a drag-n-dropped image or pdf and convert it to a preset (usually png or jpeg) format using the 'sips' tool. Very handy for dropping PDF screenshots.

CleanCopy: YAW (yet another widget) I wrote. Cleans out all of the formatting you get from gay Safari copy of formatted text.

They all sit in a little row off to the far right bottom of my screen. They are all smaller than the Dock and are thus never overlapped by windows. When I'm running dual monitors at work I also have a widget I wrote that searches the company intranet list to look up a person's company phone extension, and I run a few stock tickers as well.

All of that being said, Dashboard is useless to me. Widgets are toys. Little bits of software that make one certain task quick and easy. Having Dashboard hidden is useless for this! If I want to go to a different window to get access to easy information, I'll just go to my Safari window and click a bookmark. Sure, being able to tie into Cocoa is a bonus, but looking at the first documents released about integrating cocoa bundles into a Dashboard widget reveals some problems. The only recommended cocoa objects to be used in a widget are the objects in the NSText family. All of the Save, Open File, and other dialogs display at a window level below that of dashboard and are therefore unusable by the widgets. At least according to the preliminary documents I've read. Apple might have changed it in one of the latest seeds, but I doubt it.

All in all, I think Konfab is still going to be better for certain tasks. Mainly the task of providing continuous access to small amounts of information or small little tasks.

Re:This one has been around for years...

[Cappy Red]

Wow! That's really cool. Any idea when they started doing it?

Thanks for pointing it out... I think that's going to be my movie showtime tool now too. :)

Re:This one has been around for years...

[Cappy Red]

Don't forget the Project Gutenberg tool. Yeah, you can get the books online, but the sherlock tool gets you to the text faster(and doesn't suffer from the page-view hampering of google).

That was a submitted idea....

[Microsift]

They also have a suggestion for "stupid republican quote" widget, that will probably be easier to do.

Can someone please explain...

[kenthorvath]

I've tried konfabulator, and while there were some interesting little utilities that it had, how are these widgets any different/better than any other app that I can write with Xcode? What makes a widget so special?

Re:Can someone please explain...

[DavidLeblond]

A widget is special because it can be called up by hitting the Dashboard key and then gotten rid of quickly.

The code behind a widget is nothing new/special... its HTML. You can mix in Javascript and Cocoa as well (I guess you just embed them into the HTML? I'm not sure)

Re:Can someone please explain...

[ferratus]

It's really nice. I've been using multiple developer preview releases over the last few months (legally) and Dashboard certainly sticks out as being a very useful feature.

Press F12, they all appear, use them and hit F12 again and they're gone. Instantly. Stuff like:

- the iTunes controller.

- calculator (no more opening this app for just a quick calculation)

- the calendar view (simply seing the entire month is handy, since otherwise you had to go to the terminal, iCal or editing the time to see it, your iCal stuff also appear)

- Converter. Converting money from CAD to USD (in my case) is really convinient and faster than hitting a web site)

Overall, very nice feature. It's one of those things that makes it really hard to go back to panther after using Tiger for a little while.

Re:Can someone please explain...

[eluusive]

I believe you call Cocoa functions via the ECMAscript engine. There is a binding provided for ECMAscript.

Re:Can someone please explain...

[aftk2]

Hey, I was wondering - can you map dashboard to a screen corner, like you can with expose?

Re:Can someone please explain...

[Moofie]

"how are these widgets any different/better than any other app that I can write with Xcode?"

The fact that you don't have to write them with Xcode.

Re:Can someone please explain...

[ferratus]

Yes, there's also an icon in the dock if that's your thing (I usually remove it though)

Re:Can someone please explain...

[Anonymous Coward]

In otherwords, Apple reinvented ActiveX 8()

Re:Can someone please explain...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously..

"how are these widgets any different/better than any other app that I can write with Xcode?"

I'll translate this for everyone.

Hi, I am a big fat fuck who is looking for approval. I don't have any friends and I want to impress people in this akward fat ass way.
Perhaps one day I will be able to see my penis.

Re:Can someone please explain...

[Anubis350]

can you also use it on the normal desktop instead of it's own layer (like superkaramba, gdesklets, or even konfabulator, etc)?

Re:Can someone please explain...

[TheRaven64]

- the iTunes controller.

I can see this might be useful, although I'm not convinced that it would be more useful than iTunes in small mode. - calculator (no more opening this app for just a quick calculation)

I generally keep Longhand open and hidden for this kind of thing. - the calendar view (simply seing the entire month is handy, since otherwise you had to go to the terminal, iCal or editing the time to see it, your iCal stuff also appear)

Again, I keep iCal open and hidden for when I want to be able to see my calendar. - Converter. Converting money from CAD to USD (in my case) is really convinient and faster than hitting a web site)

You know the calculator can do currency conversions, I presume?

The real issue I have with Dashboard is that it is modal. Most of the time I would want to access something like a calculator of a calendar, I also want to be able to get at the application I'm working on.

To be fair, I wasn't convinced by Exposé when I saw the demo, and now I hate using systems without it, so I'll reserve final judgement until after my copy of Tiger arrives.

Re:Can someone please explain...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is specifically for Dashboard JavaScripts. It's not ActiveX, ActiveX is for more than Java. Apple just has language bindings for JS. It's like being able to call C functions from perl. You can call ObjC functions from JS. ActiveX is a bit more than that. ActiveX is more like a reimplementation of OpenDoc type stuff.

Definitely an ad

[fideli]

The author already posted the same "story" on MacSlash at http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/12/134823 1

Re:Definitely an ad

[objekt]

Here too: slashdot.org a couple days ago.

Re:This one has been around for longer

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Desk_Ornaments.txt

Konfabulator is an extension of Desk Accessories.

Re:Here's the best explanation straight from Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard. html

What are the criteria anyway?

[k96822]

Listen, I like Slashdot. It is the only site I surf regularly. But, sometimes, I just have to wonder what the criteria is for story postings. Why is it advertisements like this get in? Is there a problem with the story moderation system that needs fixing?

Re:What are the criteria anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the site FAQ , Slashdot allows this

Re:What are the criteria anyway?

[k96822]

I didn't see a section that says people can use Slashdot to promote their stuff. I didn't see it specifically say it can't, but culturally, I thought this was taboo.

Re:What are the criteria anyway?

[Moofie]

"I thought this was taboo"

What made you think that?

Re:What are the criteria anyway?

[zpok]

Suppose you're a stray developer, accidentally passing /. (I know, it's farfetched, but still), wouldn't you be interested in a new developer website?

Re:What are the criteria anyway?

[k96822]

I guess just not seeing it happen before.

Re:What are the criteria anyway?

[k96822]

Okay, I guess I'm wrong here. I didn't realize we could self-promote on here. I thought it was kindof like the hacker rule. You can't call yourself a hacker, someone else has to give you that name. So, like with Slashdot, you can't put your own web-site up, but someone else has to sponsor it. Then again, the moderators kinda do that anyway, so I see your points on this.

Re:What are the criteria anyway?

[Moofie]

You must be new here.

Re:What are the criteria anyway?

[k96822]

I suppose, depending on how you define new. However, the first post appears to say the same thing, and it is moderated Informative +5. So, you know, I'm definitely not alone. Duplicate posts happen all the time here too, but that doesn't make them right either. The latter is more of a mistake, though. At any rate, I'm not dissing the developer site, I'm just wondering about the rules.

Automator?

[swein515]

And why no thinly veiled advertisement for Automator Sites? :)

Re:Automator?

[BugDave]

mmm i love that site. Will be happy to use it all the time when Tiger is released. Thanks for the reminder.

Because nobody has the OS that runs yet these ....

[acomj]

The sites in the post and comments look intereting. Then I realized, while interesting the OS version to run dashboard widgets is only in the hands of apple developers. It will be a while till the rest of us can run them.

The sites look good though.

Re:This one has been around for longer

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have modded you up, but you didn't make a clickable link -- it's not like it's hard or time consuming.

Desk Accessories

Re:Because nobody has the OS that runs yet these .

[sac13]

Apple developers have had it for awhile now. The rest of us will have it April 29.

Re:This one has been around for longer

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely right. But thanks anyway.

- Lazy Anonymous Coward : D

3 dashboard widget sites - but 0 for the masses

[Psychic Burrito]

I've tried out all of the dashboard sites (dashboardexchange, dashboardwidgets and dashboardlineup), but none of them really seemed done "right" when compared with the konfabulator page:

• All we want is a big fat button to the widgets-gallery download-page, and no other distractions. Because all 95% of the visitors want is to download widgets. The best thing would be to actually make the widgets page the front page
• Show all widgets in a similar way: Title, a few words, a screenshot that is always the same size. Let users rate widgets and display the result here, too.
• Allocate the same space for each widget. Show 5 or 10 of them on a page.
• Have a detail page with further comments by the author and feedback by the users.
• Make everything stylish. Widgets are, in a way, both about substance and style.

Now, let's compare those pages, and you'll hopefully see what I mean:

• Konfabulator The original. Nice, clean, efficient. And beautiful.
• Dashboard Exchange Inconsitent design, varying preview sizes, too much stuff shown at once, no ratings.
• Dasboard Widgets Tiny preview pictures that don't convey any information. Some don't even have a preview, this should be mandatory. Compare it with Konfabulator and will likely agree that the page is pretty ugly. No ratings.
• Dashboard Lineup The newest contender, has more proudness than value. It's not even a dedicated widget-database, just a plain ol' blog. No short description. Only 2 widgets. No ratings, only comments.

Funny that there aren't any entries that are more professional, because with Konfabulator already being there, one had only to copy the concept.

In 2 weeks Apple releases tiger, and thousands of people will eagerly search the web for widgets. There's a huge opportunity here, too bad all current contenders didn't realize this.

Re:3 dashboard widget sites - but 0 for the masses

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What is your problem with Dashboard Widgets? It has a pretty decent site, including most of your bullet points. The only way they fall down is that their front page is devoted to news, and you have to click to get to the gallery (or showcase as they call it). This also seems to be one of the few sites with quite a few widgets already up and available. You claim their preview icons are too small. They are 128x128 which is plenty large on my monitor and larger than most of the images on the Konfabulator site, even with the background image they add to all of theirs. You also complain that they don't have previews for all of them, which is a valid complaint.

Your love for the Konfabulator site, however, is misguided. I found it unintuitive. Their was no text link for more information on the widgets, only two unlabeled graphics, neither of which had an alt tag set. There is also a "More Widgets" button for each widget which, until I clicked it, I had no idea would take me to more widgets by the same author. Sorry, but if you're looking for an expertly designed web site, the Konfabulator site should not be your example.

I gave up on Konfabulator because it was just too dog slow. Hopefully dashboard will not have the same problem.

Re:3 dashboard widget sites - but 0 for the masses

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, many graphics on the Konfabulator site make is slow *if* you're on a slow connection. I'm on a fast pipe and I've got no waiting time whatsoever - granted, I'm displaying 25 items at once, so there are less reloads. Yes, a details link @Konfabulator would be good, and missing alt tags is not really nice.

Now let's look at Dashboard Widgets a big closer:
- The preview icons are really small, and badly antialiased. The current item #2 is 99x20 pixels, and doesn't really tell anything about the app.
- No list of the latest additions (unless the title page does it and it's poorly labeled). People will scan through all the widgets, then when they come back later you want to show them what's new.
- No rating
- Design: The static top bar is incompatible with the "scroll one page down" function (button / click in lower scrollbar area): All browsers scroll the whole lenght of a page including the hidden part, so you will miss some info when you scroll down. No problem yet, as there are no pages 2+ screens tall.
- Design: They should enforce that all preview pictures have a certain minimum size, because the pictures are a much bigger clicking target than the "Details" text link, so people prefer it. Plus it just looks ugly with all that white space and low-information preview pics.

Cheers!

Re:3 dashboard widget sites - but 0 for the masses

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

You're right, many graphics on the Konfabulator site make is slow *if* you're on a slow connection.

You misunderstand me. I gave up on Konfabulator because it was too slow, not because the web site was too slow. Content is king and the Konfabulator product was just not useful enough and was a huge resource hog when I tried it out. Their website loads acceptably. (Only just acceptably, it took a second or two to load the first page and I have most of a T1 to myself right now.)

Re:3 dashboard widget sites - but 0 for the masses

[superflippy]

What is your problem with Dashboard Widgets?

Mystery Meat navigation. The only way I was able to find their Widget Showcase was by clicking on teeny tiny text in the top blog post. If you want people to come to your site to *get* widgets, you need to make it easier for people to *find* widgets. If it's a site for developers, you need to make it easy for them to find useful developer stuff like code snippets, examples, and discussion forums.

<rant>What are those icons supposed to be, anyway? Home, Interrogation, Folder, Bookmarks, Search? That's my initial impression after staring at them for probably several seconds more than casual visitors would. If I bother to roll over the pretty pictures, I get Home, Showcase, Forums, Links, About. What is so freaking hard about putting text on the normal state so people can see that they are buttons and see where they go?</rant>

List of Existing Dashboard Widget Sites

[lux55]

• DashboardExposed (I'm the admin of this site)
• DashboardWidgets
• Widget Developer
• Dashboard Exchange

Re:List of Existing Dashboard Widget Sites

[unlinear]

plus, pretty soon:

http://macwidgets.net/
by the creators of macthemes.net, so it should be good.

graphics

[chasingporsches]

might want to create your own graphics there, chief. like the dashboard logo and i believe apple has a trademark on the wallpaper that you used as a background too. i can hear the iron-clad boot of Apple Legal's Cease And Desist orders coming your way now..

Isn't Dashboard just Konfabulator?

[bach37]

This is what I thought was going on here. Even the widgets look identical. There were articles about this awhile back. Anyone know?

Re:Isn't Dashboard just Konfabulator?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Isn't Dashboard just Konfabulator?

Nope. They are both implementations of the same idea though. Mac OS 7, and several other older systems used "mini apps" and these are just the same thing re-implemented. Apple's version (Dashboard) has a few advantages since it is integrated into the OS more fully, ships with tiger by default (larger user base) and supposedly is easier to create widgets for (HTML and javascript just like web apps). Konfabulator beat them to market by a good margin, but when I tried it was pretty resource hungry. I imagine the Konfabulator guys are looking for a new project right about now. It is hard to sell a app that competes with one included with the OS, and is arguably inferior.

Re:Because nobody has the OS that runs yet these .

[lux55]

You can preview widgets now by downloading them, unzipping them, and running the main html file in Safari.

Uhm....

[Paladeen]

What I don't understand is why everybody gets so excited about this whole Dashboard thing?

Roughly the same thing can be accomplised with a combination of regular good ol' Mac OS X applications and multiple desktops. Just pile your calculator, IMDB searcher, digits converter and whatnot on to one of your virtual desktops, set a shortcut key for it in DesktopManager.

Voila, you have just replicated the functionality of Dashboard, minus the blatant overhead of all those processor-hogging graphical effects.

It seems to me that Dashboard is definintely one of the least interesting new features in Tiger.

Re:Uhm....

[Steve Cowan]

What I like about Dashboard is its integration with the UI. These "widgets" are actually representations of little fictitious devices. The Macintosh operating system of old had "desk accessories" - essentially cute little applets, like an alarm clock and a calculator, that were launched from the Apple menu, and appeared on top of whatever app you were running.

21 years later Tiger kicks that concept up a notch, by having a sort of a desk accessories layer that allows you to have all these little movable devices appear on top of the document you're currently working on. There's value in that! If you're working on a document you don't ever need to take your eyes off it if you just want to paste a word into your thesaurus for a quick synonym, or quickly figure out 53 divided by 8.

Virtual desktops are another approach, but the effect is visually jarring and your brain takes a moment to get back on track when you finally return to your work. With dashboard's widgets sitting on top of your work, you're not likely to forget what you were doing.

OS X is chock full of gratuitous visual effects and animations like icons that shrink a little to make room for one more, minimizing windows pour themselves into the dock, menus fade out, panels slide out of the window you're working on instead of dialogs just appearing front and center -- while you don't really need any of that stuff, it gives the whole computing experience a natural feel. It makes you feel more like the UI elements on your screen are actual physical things that you touch and interact with. Dashboard builds on this.

OS X's UI is advanced, and it comes at the expense of some processor cycles. Other GUIs need processor cycles too, just less.

Re:Uhm....

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree, with the added inconvenience that it uses the F12 key, which on the laptops is for CD/DVD ejection.

Why would I want javascript apps integrated into the OS though? the iTunes controller is already tiny, and with AppleScript, the rest is only a click away. Most of those applescripts are already written, and automator will make quick work of the rest.

Dashboard X

[JPyObjC Dude]

I'd love to see a similar technology developed using X so that I can have a dashboard app running on a hand held computer with linux driving some applications running on an Mac Mini or iBook in my back pack or other hidden location.

This would be awesome for a sweet super iPod, iPod Photo, Audio and video streaming device...

Maybe a Mozilla minimo project could be developed to accomplish this.

JsD

Integration

[Paladeen]

I can understand what you mean by the integration with the GUI, having tried it out myself. And it's true that virtual desktops can be a big disconcerting.

However, I don't agree with you that the OS X GUI is "advanced". The graphical effects get extremely tired after a while. I now keep them turned off, even going so far as to mess with GUI settings using TinkerTool, just to get rid of the damned stuff.

I recently bought a new 1.3Ghz PowerBook, in hope that this might improve my user experience with Mac OS X, but I still find the GUI ridiculously slow, even with all effects off. I still love OS X, but dammit, I have yet to try a Mac with acceptable GUI speed apart from those speedy G5s. Scrolling web pages is faster on my old 500 Mhz laptop in OS 9 than on a brand spanking new 1.3Ghz G4 with OS X. That's just ridiculous regress.

My biggest beef with the OS X UI, though, is not the performance. I'm usually not in much of a hurry ;). The biggest problem is the OS X Finder, which is, to put it bluntly, a piece of shit. Not only is it slow and cumbersome, and very badly designed (is it a browser? is it spatial? is it aqua? is it metal? Why can't it remember window positions?), but it tends to crash once in a while when it bumps into corrupt file meta-data or has issues with networked volumes. It could also do with consideraly better threading -- I hate that damn Spinning Beachball of Death.

I believe one of the reasons Apple is coming up with this Spotlight thing is in order to enable users to circumvent the piece of shit Finder.

My 2 cents.

Re:Integration

[Steve Cowan]

I agree with you about 90% about the Finder. Apple would do well to listen to John Siracusa. Every time I have lots of files to sort through or move around I try my hand at it, I try putting folders in the thingie on the left (which aren't spring-loaded for some reason), I try using modifier keys with drag-and-drop operations that never seem to behave the way I expect them to, you can't marquee-select stuff in list view by starting in vacant white space...

I wish somebody could just recreate the elegance of the classic finder from the OS 9 days. Every nuance, every feature. It was just perfect. Oh well....

dashboard doubts?

[zpok]

I'm completely sold, if only for the convenience of having the calculator one click away, a translator that's not in Sherlock and a separate currency convertor. If the flight schedule widget works with international flights, I'll be in widget heaven, and if the world clock is as simple as shown, man, how cool would that be?

All things already available in OS X or on the web, but imagine having the things *I* need one click away...

I'm all for it.

Re:dashboard doubts?

[Anonymous Coward]

All things already available in OS X or on the web, but imagine having the things *I* need one click away...

because having a shortcut/link/bookmark takes so many more clicks?

Re:dashboard doubts?

[zpok]

All good things are obvious. Powered steering IS nice, although I've happily driven a battered Renault without it.

Dashboard is like Exposé, absolutely not essential, but in reality it makes life so much easier. Are other systems so much more trouble? Yes. Can I do without? Yes. That's not the point.

For flights, I have to go to the destination airport website and hope they have decent tracking online. For translations and such I use Sherlock, not bad, but I don't really need the extra fluff.

I use the calculator dayly, sometimes for simple calculations, sometimes for money exchange. It's a nice tool, but a dedicated money exchange thingy would be nicer. For some reason I always close the calculator the moment I'm done, to have to reopen it again five minutes later. Trivial, I know...

And since my wife and I are half the time in different time zones it's nice to be able to set up a quick clock for the city she's in without all the other distractions.

It's not that it now takes sooooo much more effort, it's that with dashboard a shitheap of trivial things are now in one place, but separate if you know what I mean, just as I set them up.

Long story short: dashboard makes stupid things simpler, that's what computers are for.

btw: I wrote this in the assumption that you're interested in the answer, if not, carry on, it's not important.

Re:dashboard doubts?

[Anonymous Coward]

The flight schedule widget does, in fact, work with international flights. It even has a nice little world map.

Re:dashboard doubts?

[zpok]

There you go, I'm in widget heaven...

Mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

"I tried Konfabulator, as did a number of people I know."

"When the demo expired and I had to consider paying for it, I had already stopped using it"

What is insightful about this ?

A nice widget

[Enrique1218]

One that can readout the load on each processor among other things from Process Viewer in small window off to the side

Your all forgetting 1 site!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://widgetdeveloper.com

This website is brand new and is very undiscovered