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OS X Operating Systems Businesses GUI Software Apple

10.4 Widget Site Opens Doors 110

Posted by timothy from the or-at-least-pages dept.
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."
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10.4 Widget Site Opens Doors More

10.4 Widget Site Opens Doors

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  • What about the other Dashboard sites? (Score:5, Informative)

    by vocaro ( 569257 ) <trevor@vocaro.com> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:18PM (#12237941)
    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 [dashboardexchange.com] and DashboardWidgets [dashboardwidgets.com]?

    • You beat me to it...another advert posing as a story.

      • 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?

        • Re:What about the other Dashboard sites? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by andreMA ( 643885 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @05:08PM (#12238495)
          Floating clocks and weather forcasts? WTF?

          Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

          For you, at this point, perhaps not. Stock quotes and realtime airline flight tracking are also commonly mentioned as Dashboard uses, as are currency converters, calculators, webcam monitors, whatnot. I suspect that many people will find one or more of these quite useful; if you don't then that's fine: don't use them.

          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 ,
          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
          • Honestly its one of these things you do not need till you use it ,, then its a pain to do without
            Kinda like what they did to me with Expose, to which I was very lukewarm until I spent a few days using it. Damn, you, Apple!
            • Couldnt agree more , I find myself subconsiously hitting my hotkeys for "show all open windows" on fluxbox . .. on that note.
              Does anyone know an implementation of this for the FreeDesktop(honestly i dont care which ,it is enough for me to switch to nearly any windows manager or desktop enviroment)
        • Floating clocks and weather forcasts? WTF?

          Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

          Yeah, who ever needs to know the time or what it's like outside??
        • Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

          and is it really the killer feature that should be on the apple [apple.com] homepage?

        • Floating clocks and weather forcasts? WTF?... Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?

          Yes, really. I get to work in the morning and bring up Konfabulator with a hot key, and while I'm unloading my bag I can glance at a big clock and calendar on the screen from across the room, then sit down and get the weather forecast so I can plan field work (no windows!), check the ferry lineup in the webcam frame, glance over my iCal to-do list, note any active network connections as well as

          • I think the free widget community is going to come up with some very interesting uses.

            What bugs me about that prediction is that Konf has been around a while now. If the "free widget community" (if there is such a thing) was going to come up with some very interesting uses, wouldn't they have done so by now?
            • 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
        • I use the Konfabulator phase-of-moon widget to know when it's time to play Nethack.
      • You beat me to it...another advert posing as a story.

        Hm, sounds like slashdot was bought by Gannett.

    • Re:What about the other Dashboard sites? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mipod ( 876164 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:31PM (#12238073)
      Yeah, honestly... there have been a bunch of Dashboard sites around for a while, The Dashboard [thedashboarder.com] was created a few days after DB was announced. Being innovative would be far more worthy of a slashdot post, rather than coming out with a crappy looking site 9 months late.

      If you want to see a nice one, though, look at DashboardWidgets [dashboardwidgets.com]. Lotsa widgets up already...

    • Why no mention of the other Dashboard sites that have sprung up recently

      Why, because they haven't submitted their stories to Slashdot. ;)

    • It wasn't thinly veiled: "My new venture has just opened its doors."

      Doesn't get much more blatant than that.

  • http://www.konfabulator.com

    • Re:This one has been around for years... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:37PM (#12238136)

      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.


      • 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 Sher
      • The lack of compelling/really useful widgets was a problem.

        Oh, for the lurva Pete!

        I don't happen to care much for Konfabulator, but there are nearly 1,000 widgets for it. They cover every single thing Apple is scraping together for Dashboard. And you can be sure nearly everything to be "invented" for Dashboard later will already have been Konfabulated.

        It just was not very useful. Dashboard looks to be more so.

        Er, yeah. They both work the same way and do the same thing.

        And it is free, so

        It's $12

        • I don't happen to care much for Konfabulator, but there are nearly 1,000 widgets for it.

          There were not 1000 when I first tried using it. 50 Maybe 100. And very few of them did anything I was not already doing with a stand alone application or was faster just to look up with my web browser.

          Er, yeah. They both work the same way and do the same thing.

          Hopefully not, or I'll not use dashboard. Konfabulator was eating half of one of my cpus and a good chunk of memory while sitting idle, with only a few

      • This is what I thought was going on here. Even the widgets look identical. There were articles about this awhile back. Anyone know?

        • Isn't Dashboard just Konfabulator?

          Nope. They are both implementations of the same idea though. Mac OS 7, and several other older systems used "mini apps" and these are just the same thing re-implemented. Apple's version (Dashboard) has a few advantages since it is integrated into the OS more fully, ships with tiger by default (larger user base) and supposedly is easier to create widgets for (HTML and javascript just like web apps). Konfabulator beat them to market by a good margin, but when I tried it

      • I stopped using it because it was a hog, and just slowed down my machine too much.

        Dashboard is entirely webkit with JavaScript, it's going to eat CPU power like there's no tomorrow. I'm wondering what was wrong with just writing applications, but I'm obviously in the minority.

        Dave
        • From what I recall from playing with the Tiger beta oh so long ago, dashboard is fairly light wieght while it's hidden. Of course, when you bring it forward, the CPU load goes up considerably, but when it's in the background, it's fairly nice to the CPU.
      • 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.
        • That's been fixed for a while. F8 is Konfabulator's friend now, and they stay out of the way.

          • That's been fixed for a while. F8 is Konfabulator's friend now, and they stay out of the way.

            There is a problem with Konfabulator's marketing exposed by your comment. I did not know Konfabulator had fixed that problem either. I tossed it early on, because it was just not good enough, or useful enough. Now it is probably better in a number of ways, but I am certainly not motivated to download it again and try it out again. The demo expired in a month and for people like me who often test out new usabi

      • Dashboard looks to be more so

        I did pretty much the same thing. Grabbed a copy when it first came out, downloaded a heckuva lot of widgets, opened em all up and drooled at the eye candy. Then I noticed my system was dogging and I didn't really find them all useful.

        But instead of blaming the software, I thought about it and maybe it was the way I was using it that was causing the problem. Two things have happened that make Konfab my 2nd most needed app (second only to Adium, www.adiumx.com).

        #1: Arlo and P
    • Konfabulator clutters up my desktop with shite. Dashboard does not. That is why I will be using Dashboard, and not Konfabulator. Do you see?

    • I paid for Konfabulator. It hasn't been updated this year, and crashes frequently. It's also a rsource hog.

  • I've tried konfabulator, and while there were some interesting little utilities that it had, how are these widgets any different/better than any other app that I can write with Xcode? What makes a widget so special?
    • A widget is special because it can be called up by hitting the Dashboard key and then gotten rid of quickly.

      The code behind a widget is nothing new/special... its HTML. You can mix in Javascript and Cocoa as well (I guess you just embed them into the HTML? I'm not sure)

    • Re:Can someone please explain... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ferratus ( 244145 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:54PM (#12238331) Homepage
      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.
    • "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.
  • The author already posted the same "story" on MacSlash at http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/12/134823 1 [macslash.org]
  • 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?

  • Automator? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swein515 ( 195260 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:56PM (#12238361) Journal
    And why no thinly veiled advertisement for Automator Sites? [automatorworld.com] :)
  • The sites in the post and comments look intereting. Then I realized, while interesting the OS version to run dashboard widgets is only in the hands of apple developers. It will be a while till the rest of us can run them.

    The sites look good though.

  • 3 dashboard widget sites - but 0 for the masses (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Psychic Burrito ( 611532 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:16PM (#12239136)
    I've tried out all of the dashboard sites (dashboardexchange, dashboardwidgets and dashboardlineup), but none of them really seemed done "right" when compared with the konfabulator page:
    • 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 [widgetgallery.com] The original. Nice, clean, efficient. And beautiful.
    • Dashboard Exchange [dashboardexchange.com] Inconsitent design, varying preview sizes, too much stuff shown at once, no ratings.
    • Dasboard Widgets [dashboardwidgets.com] 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 [dashboardlineup.com] 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 is your problem with Dashboard Widgets [dashboardwidgets.com]? It has a pretty decent site, including most of your bullet points. The only way they fall down is that their front page is devoted to news, and you have to click to get to the gallery (or showcase as they call it). This also seems to be one of the few sites with quite a few widgets already up and available. You claim their preview icons are too small. They are 128x128 which is plenty large on my monitor and larger than most of the images on the Konfabulator sit

      • What is your problem with Dashboard Widgets?

        Mystery Meat navigation [webpagesthatsuck.com]. The only way I was able to find their Widget Showcase was by clicking on teeny tiny text in the top blog post. If you want people to come to your site to *get* widgets, you need to make it easier for people to *find* widgets. If it's a site for developers, you need to make it easy for them to find useful developer stuff like code snippets, examples, and discussion forums.

        <rant>What are those icons supposed to be, anyway? Home, In

  • List of Existing Dashboard Widget Sites (Score:4, Informative)

    by lux55 ( 532736 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:23PM (#12239215) Homepage Journal
  • might want to create your own graphics there, chief. like the dashboard logo and i believe apple has a trademark on the wallpaper that you used as a background too. i can hear the iron-clad boot of Apple Legal's Cease And Desist orders coming your way now..
  • What I don't understand is why everybody gets so excited about this whole Dashboard thing?

    Roughly the same thing can be accomplised with a combination of regular good ol' Mac OS X applications and multiple desktops. Just pile your calculator, IMDB searcher, digits converter and whatnot on to one of your virtual desktops, set a shortcut key for it in DesktopManager.

    Voila, you have just replicated the functionality of Dashboard, minus the blatant overhead of all those processor-hogging graphical effects.

    I

    • Re:Uhm.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Steve Cowan ( 525271 )
      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 d
      • I can understand what you mean by the integration with the GUI, having tried it out myself. And it's true that virtual desktops can be a big disconcerting.

        However, I don't agree with you that the OS X GUI is "advanced". The graphical effects get extremely tired after a while. I now keep them turned off, even going so far as to mess with GUI settings using TinkerTool, just to get rid of the damned stuff.

        I recently bought a new 1.3Ghz PowerBook, in hope that this might improve my user experience with Mac
        • I agree with you about 90% about the Finder. Apple would do well to listen to John Siracusa. Every time I have lots of files to sort through or move around I try my hand at it, I try putting folders in the thingie on the left (which aren't spring-loaded for some reason), I try using modifier keys with drag-and-drop operations that never seem to behave the way I expect them to, you can't marquee-select stuff in list view by starting in vacant white space...

          I wish somebody could just recreate the elegance
  • I'd love to see a similar technology developed using X so that I can have a dashboard app running on a hand held computer with linux driving some applications running on an Mac Mini or iBook in my back pack or other hidden location.

    This would be awesome for a sweet super iPod, iPod Photo, Audio and video streaming device...

    Maybe a Mozilla minimo project could be developed to accomplish this.

    JsD
  • I'm completely sold, if only for the convenience of having the calculator one click away, a translator that's not in Sherlock and a separate currency convertor. If the flight schedule widget works with international flights, I'll be in widget heaven, and if the world clock is as simple as shown, man, how cool would that be?

    All things already available in OS X or on the web, but imagine having the things *I* need one click away...

    I'm all for it.
  • One that can readout the load on each processor among other things from Process Viewer in small window off to the side

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