Konfabulator Strikes Back

Brian Ambrozy 23 Jun, 2005 at 12:53pm ET Article published in Tech

Pixoria, who had been highly praised for their Konfabulator software, must have taken the news that OS X Tiger would include “Dashboard” very glumly. Konfabulator and Dashboard do essentially the same thing – provide for graphical “widgets” that are easily authored and provide access to common tasks such as searches, weather, and package tracking. With the announcement that OS X 10.4 would include Dashboard, people claimed it was a death knell for the long-beloved Konfabulator package.

Pixoria didn’t take the news sitting down. Instead they release their new version, Konfabulator 2, for Windows.

ArsTechnica has a review of this new product. I use Dashboard on my mac, and I must say it is extremely handy sometimes. Now that it’s available for Windows, I will probably end up grabbing it for my home computer. It’s one of those “once you use it, you can’t go back” type of things.

Source: ArsTechnica

Comments

23 Jun 2005 ~ 1:11pm GnomeWizardd hmmm intersesting.... /me tries
23 Jun 2005 ~ 1:43pm BuddyJ Looks cool but the lack of killer widgets really keeps me from running it. A good start that they can hopefully improve on.
23 Jun 2005 ~ 1:51pm Garg No useful widgets for me. I don't need a big clock or something else to control Winamp. Besides, I have windows open that would probably cover it up. Although I didn't see any screenshots of the thing itself on their page, so I don't even know how it behaves.
23 Jun 2005 ~ 2:28pm GnomeWizardd I am liking the picture frame and the Weatehr on my desktop. Its hard for me to like a weather thing on my desktop but this one is nice.
23 Jun 2005 ~ 3:21pm entropy Nifty. Prime, any specific widgets you just can't live without?
23 Jun 2005 ~ 6:26pm shwaip I am so writing a folding status widget. If I can learn XML...and JS...and I find the time.
23 Jun 2005 ~ 6:43pm primesuspect THAT would be awesome!
23 Jun 2005 ~ 6:59pm primesuspect Entropy:

I have never used Konfabulator so I'm not sure what widgets are available, but the ones that I use daily on my mac are the package tracker, the sticky note, the yellow pages, the calculator, and a gmail notifier.

Nothing revolutionary, but the one-button access to all of those tools is what makes it so good for me. I hit F12 and they appear, I hit F12 again and they disappear.
25 Jun 2005 ~ 11:41pm shwaip I've got a few on my desk:
the weather one
a binary clock
a note/to do type list
my folding widget...

I've been looking for a decent calculator widget, and they're all too complicated or don't work. One of them broke on 2*cos(Pi). 100% cpu usage, had to kill w/ the task manager.
26 Jun 2005 ~ 2:22am jared very cool, not using to much memory.. yet

I am using large digital clock (I can actually see it across the room andyou can set an alarm), to do list, weather, and the all in one search thingy. I didn't see a folding one.

Either way for such small applications they are very nice. All XML and Javascript, just change the file from .widget to .zip and you explore the inner workings. Now lets develop something for SM
26 Jun 2005 ~ 11:07am shwaip Yeah, they're really easy to write neat stuff with.

Among other things, these are really easy:
Getting/posting data to webpages
reading/writing text files
timered events
transparency
actions on clicking

you name it, it's probably in javascript or their javascript engine