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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."
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?
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.
Man, you sure don't have a sense of humor...and also some pretty selective vision.
3.A Stupid Republican Quote Widget.
Uh, yeah. I'm a jackass.
You win, though: first of five to point it out.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
IP Therefore I am.
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?
And why no thinly veiled advertisement for Automator Sites? :)
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.
--
$tar -xvf
- 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.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
"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.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
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.