NOTE:
Gearblog has morphed into Gibbsblog. All new postings, same great Gibbs. Come on over!

Konfabulator -- cross-platform Dashboard widgets

By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 06/23/05

If you have a Macintosh running OS X you'll be familiar with Dashboard widgets, mini-applications that provide "things" such as weather reports, calculators, and utility functions that you might or might not be able to live without. Well, if you've seen Dashboard on the Mac and thought "why isn't there a similar system for Windows?" then today is your lucky day ...

A subsystem called Konfabulator has been created by Pixoria, Inc. that provides a similar paradigm except that 1. it works cross-platform and 2. the widgets aren't tied to a single layer in the Z-order! That's right, Konfabulator widgets can operate under both Windows and OS X and be always on top, float on top, float, be always on the bottom, or be revealed by a hot-key.

Creating Konfabulator widgets is done using JavaScript and XML and platform specific integration is possible (for example, using COM objects under Windows).

Interesting and potentially a killer mini-application platform.

Back to Gearblog

Comments