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Yahoo Launches Dashboard
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has a 'live' post from a Yahoo press conference this morning showing something called Yahoo Dashboard. It looks awwwfully familiar. They brought out Ellen DeGeneres to demo it, and Tom Cruise to show an MI: 3 trailer for some reason." From the article: "I would like to announce right now what we call Yahoo Go. If you have some of the same problems dealing with things as Ellen .... Yahoo Go ... is a revolutionary way to connect users to Web services they already use. We're installing new applications right on devices (pix of laptop, TV, phone)." Dashboard is the relaunch of Konfabulator. We reported on Yahoo!'s purchase of Konfabulator last year.
It was Konfabulator 3 months ago, then it was Yahoo! Widgets, and now it is Yahoo! Dashboard? Are they trying to confuse people? I wonder if they'll have problems with Apple for using "Dahsboard".
today is spelling optional day.
...but negative style points to Yahoo for trotting out Ellen Degeneres (really not that funny anymore) and Tom Cruise (Scientology poster boy and general nutcase). If these are the kind of people using Yahoo Go, I'll just do without thanks.
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Otherwise I haven't been able to find another good application - that fits my needs - that I'm willing to give up RAM to.
All of these dashboard ideas seem like a solution looking for a good idea - and from personal experience and talking to friends that idea hasn't really been found just yet.
OK, so Apple ripped off Konfabulator with OS X Tiger's Dashboard. Now Yahoo (who bought Konfabulator) are ripping off Apple by rebranding it "Yahoo Dashboard". Clever, since Dashboard is waaay more famous a brand than Konfabulator, but Apple can't sue Yahoo for ripping them off since if they did Yahoo would counter-sue on the basis that Apple ripped off Konfabulator.
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I've completely disabled Dashboard on my iBook. I can't see the advantage of it over standard desktop apps - especially given that they each use about 10MB of real RAM. Give me Calculator.app any day. Launches in a single bounce, and has a whole ton more functionality than the widget. Many if not most of the widgets don't take advantage of the ability to write Obj-C code, making them simple Javascript/HTML apps. Those things I'd rather look at in my browser window.
Other than Yahoo execs? I'm a Mac user, and while I thought Dashboard was pretty kewl at first, my enthusiasm quicky waned. Now I've disabled it. Most of the funchtionality of it was already available on various web pages, and I can close the browser down and reclaim resources. With Dashboard, those widgets are consuming memory and other resources even when Dashboard isn't showing. Will Yahoo's version act the same way? Maybe a Konfabulator user can weigh in on this.
Mod this down as a troll, but I just can't care about Yahoo's version of Apple's version of Konfabulator. Big waste of resources.
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> ...you could say Konfabulator copied Active Desktop in a more effective way...
YES! I have always thought that active desktop was a great idea with a horrible implementation, and when people showed me Konfabulator, it seemed to me to be a better implementation, but still not good enough.
The idea of having desk accessories, small, one-purpose quick apps handy, is just sooo obvious, you can't give credit to anyone for that. The idea of embedding them in an out-of-the-way-yet-easily-accessible layer of the OS is also really obvious. So Konfabulator can't take credit for much, and neither should Apple, and accusations of copy-cat in either direction are totally ill-founded.
That leaves the only aspect to this whole deal that can be remotely considered 'innovative:' using an html layer in the OS that the user can configure and control to create such apps of any flavor. And as much as I love Apple, credit for that has to go to MS, who unfortunately sought to make the entire OS revolve around some bastardized browser concept, instead of just this one special layer.
What Apple can take credit for is simply for taking the initiative of making this available as part of the OS and supporting it. If you ask me, though, the implementation is still not ideal. I'd still like to access widgets that are embedded in my actual desktop in addition to in the "modal-ish" Dashboard layer, as well as being able to hide widgets behind hotspots around my monitor (like flip the mouse to a corner to bring up the calculator, flip it back to that corner to hide it again).
Finally, Yahoo's decision to name their product Dashboard is really sad. Apple named theirs dashboard because they had no better name handy, and that was the easiest way to effectively communicate what the product is. The people who came up with the name Konfabulator really hit on a gold nugget from a sheer marketing perspective. Who doesn't want to own a 'Konfabulator?' Yahoo should have kept that name and leveraged it. It's akin to Apple buying the iPod from another company and then renaming it to 'MP3 Player.'
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