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Google Gadgets Join Dashboard Widgets As KDE Plasmoids
Balinares writes "As another sign of Google's growing interest in the Linux desktop, according to a Google developer, the Linux implementation of Google Gadgets will be able to run natively as KDE Plasmoids. After Mac OS X Dashboard widgets, this is the second major widget library to be supported in KDE Plasma."
- John
Do others find widgets useful? What are they?
Yep - I use the converter several times a day, I use the Tube travel status (London Underground) map to check things before leaving and I use four instances of the clock widget to track time in the various zones I need to interact with.
Cheers,
Ian
Now that Widgets are fast to appear and disappear (after the first load) and no longer suck (resources constantly) I find myself using a number of them. Many are default widgets even:
Sure I could run separate applications for all these, but they are lightweight and pulling them all up with a key and dismissing them just as quickly is pretty convenient. I basically think of Widgets as a single, customizable, catch-all application that keeps my dock less cluttered.
Oops, I forgot an important one. TheDailyGrind is great for tracking how much time you're putting in on different projects. It is essential for a contractor with multiple jobs and good for accounting for your time at a regular job too.
You can make any and all widgets fast to appear and disappear on linux by using compiz with the desktop widgets layer plugin. You can specify windows by the usual rules (class, title, et cetera) and they get snarfed into that layer and no longer appear anywhere else. This is a minor annoyance, because it doesn't offer an option to automatically switch to the widget layer when specific programs are launched. This would be nice, so that for example when you launch the gdesklets config app (which I have set to go to the widget layer) you go to the widgets layer automatically.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
* They're more portable - they run in Windows or OS X.
* They have MUCH less overhead. Some dashboard widgets have a CPU% in the double digets while Dashboard is open!
* They're not constrained to the dashboard.
I have a feeling that part of the reason that Apple stuck their widgets on the dashboard was because the overhead of webkit doing AJAXy things to try and look lickable is so high. The layout engine Konfabulator introduced is much lighter weight. Whatever the reason, I found I was never using the Dashboard so I went back to Konfabulator. I used Tinkertool to disable the Dashboard completely, who needs the overhead?
When are they going to emulate Konfabulator under KDE? Hmmm?
For clarity's sake, notice that the goal of Plasma is far more ambitious than Dashboard. Plasmoids/Applets (native Plasma widgets) are meant to interact with the rest of the desktop. They can be used to stay pretty there, but also to actually carry out tasks (the part that displays folders on the desktop is an applet itself. Applets can be grouped in containers (containments; even the panel/taskbar is one of them), and some of these containers can be used to separate the desktop into different "activities" that can be accessed by zooming out of a containment and in in another.
Hope this puts things into perspective.
Disclaimer: I'm neither a KDE nor a Plasma developer, just one of the contributors of the FAQ.
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