Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.
I just tried out Konfabulator which has gotten a lot of attention because Apple just announced a virtually identically product by the name of Dashboard. This should not be confused with Nat Friedman's program of the same name, which is not at all related. Konfabulator allows the downloading and displaying of so called widgets, some of which come with the program, while others can be downloaded here. Popular widgets includes iTunes Remotes, Battery Charge Displays, Event Listings, Stock Tickers, etc. These are then displayed like normal applications, or on the Desktop, and displayed when neccessary. This is very similar to Microsoft's old (failed?!) Active Desktop, and was quite useless to me, because it cluttered up my screen.
Apple's Dashboard, seems identical to Konfabulator, but introduces an Expose like function that puts the widgets in the foreground or moves them off screen, which is what really makes this a useful idea. Konfabulator just now came out with an updated version which this feature, but the implementation is not as good UI wise. I use the program on and off, but while I find it interesting, I have not yet been able to find a good reason to permanently use it. While I like the fact that Apple is working hard on adding useful features into the base OS, it is thereby destroying popular Shareware products such as Konfabulator, LaunchBar, and Watson. It can be argued that most users would never use these programs anyway, so it is good for Apple to emulate them, but it is harming OS X developers, which could lead to many of them moving away from the platfrom,