On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 08:41 PM, Chris Devers wrote:
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Puneet Kishor wrote:Some time in early 2000 Arlo Rose came up with an idea for a cool little application. It would use XML to structure images, and a scriptable language, like Perl, in such a way that someone who knew the basics of Perl could put together cool little mini-applications. The goal was that these mini-applications would just sit around on your desktop looking pretty, while providing useful feedback. [....] A half year later Konfabulator is ready for download, and now it's up to you to see if they were right about how cool this thing can be!Shux, I just wish this had been Perl...:) Funny, a cow-orker was just telling me about this this evening. Is the material above taken from http://www.konfabulator.com/?
yes.
..well, don't go by the skinnability of it... that, in some minds, might invoke visions of zit-heavy teenagers figuring out how to make their mp3 player look like saruman's eyes. Instead, look at it this way... a hypercard without stacks, without borders... an aqua app that floats on your desktop... self-contained (well, actually the widgets require konfabulator in order to run, so it is not really that stand-alone, but the effect is)... think of it as a browser without really being a browser.
Ahh, it was written by one of the Kaleidoscope people. Ok, so it's going
to have cheesy over the top "skinz" before too long.
But anyway, I'm not sure I see the point. It seems interesting -- I'm just
going by the web page at the moment, the download is reeeallly slooooow --
but I'm not sure if I want this kind of info sitting in a new interface
widget in addition to the dock & menubar, which already claim a good deal
of screen real estate. Most of the sample widgets I've seen, I'd rather
seo them available as menubar widgets instead.
I dunno, this is slick, but I'm still underwhelmed for some reason. Maybe
it's my deep-seated aversion to software skins & related wacky interface
shenanigans that usually comes up with such software (mp3 players, etc).
with a real (some may question that, but that is not important), well-developed programming language. Javascript is actually a very nice language... it just requires a browser to be able to run, which kinda sucks. Well, konfab removes that restriction. Make your widget, and get it to download stocks, show the weather... you know, it is difficult to describe. But when you see it, you really shake your head in wonder. Kinda like what "Spring" is (have you seen Spring... another innovative application the kinds of which only seem possible on OS X... it is stuff like Konfabulator, Spring, Launchbar, Watson, and hopefully one day soon Camelbones, that make using computers worthwhile). Only, more capable.
Fun if you used to use Kaleidascope or (in x11) enlightenment though. If you're into that sort of thing :)
you make it sound dirty. ;-)
