found drama

To follow up on my Konfabulator post from late May… And while I’m a little late on this: Daring Fireball’s ‘Dashboard vs. Konfabulator’.

As I said before, I liked the idea behind Konfabulator but I had a few issues with it. I liked how the widgets looked. I didn’t like how cluttered they seemed to always make my desktop. I liked the quick access to weather and the CPU meter. I didn’t like the memory leaks. Anyway, it was a cool idea with poor implementation. And now the Konfabulator site is saying: “Cupertino, start your photocopiers!” in response to Dashboard’s announcement at WWDC.

So what do I think of Dashboard? Based on the previews and the rumors: I think I could get down with it. I like that they don’t go right on to the Desktop and instead live in an Exposé-like space that flashes in. I like that they [the Widgets] allegedly all live in the same memory space — and that said memory space has a far smaller footprint. I like the fact that anyone with a little bit of web development and/or design experience can make one of these little bad boys up from scratch. Neat!

And the reason that I cite Gruber’s article here (aside from the Blogdex pressure…):

Konfabulator contains its own self-contained JavaScript runtime engine, based on SpiderMonkey, the open source JavaScript engine from the Mozilla Project. Konfabulator UI layouts are specified in a custom XML format.[ … ]

Dashboard, on the other hand, is based on WebCore, the underlying open source layout and scripting engine behind Safari. Dashboard gadgets are indeed scripted using JavaScript, the same language used by Konfabulator, but Dashboard uses the JavaScript engine that’s built into the system. And for UI layout, Dashboard gadgets are specified using HTML and CSS – using the same rendering engine as Safari.

Wow! All-in-one-place action! Can’t wait to see how this thing pans out…

About Rob Friesel