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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."
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?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
And why no thinly veiled advertisement for Automator Sites? :)
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.
The usefullness all depends on what your doing , ,, then its a pain to do without.
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
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
- 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.
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.
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
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