Yeah, and Konfabulator is a rip-off of DesktopX, a Windows widget program that was released three-years before Konfabulator.
DesktopX screenshots
From the creator of DesktopX:
DesktopX screenshots
From the creator of DesktopX:
Quote:
|
Konfabulator is a great program. I use it on my Macintosh. I'm a registered user of it even. And Konfabulator would deserve a lot of credit for this innovation if it weren't for the inconvenient fact that DesktopX preceded it by THREE YEARS._ To be fair, DesktopX 1.0 wasn't as nice as Konfabulator is when it came to delivering widgets. But that has to do more with where hardware was back in 1999 than software technology. We had to deal with Windows 95 users running on Pentium 100s. In all our demos we made it clear which direction we were going with this. As hardware (and video cards) improved DesktopX would continuously become more and more interactive. On DesktopX, widgets are called are broken up into widgets and objects. If you install DesktopX you never even have to load it up to use widgets. Widgets are .EXE's that just use DesktopX as the run-time. So even someone comparing the two will say "Yea, but DesktopX is way more complicated than Konfabulator." No, not if you are comparing the two directly. With Konfabulator, you must run Konfabulator first to run one of its widgets. With DesktopX, as long as DesktopX is installed somewhere you can run a widget as you would any other program -- complete with a task manager icon or system tray icon for it. Where DesktopX seems more "complex" is that if you're running DesktopX you can then deal with objects and themes, both concepts that Konfabulator doesn't have. In Konfabulator, only techies can make widgets realistically. Making a Konfabulator widget involves opening up a text editor and writing Javascript._ In DesktopX, objects are integrated into the DesktopX GUI. This makes it much easier to create objects. And as a result, you tend to have much more complex content made with DesktopX than you would Konfabulator because it's easier to deal with dozens of objects put together._ These objects can then be exported as either an object pack (for other people to modify), as a theme (to replace ones desktop) or as a widget. So DesktopX may seem more complicated but only because it tried to make it easier for people to create content rather than be purely at the mercy of some small group of techies who have mastered the black art of widget making. But we've been doing this -- for years. Complete with Javascript and VB Script support. And DesktopX isn't obscure. It has remained one of the top 10 desktop enhancements on Download.com. In fact, it's been on the Download.com top downloads chart for 160 consecutive weeks. That's every week for 3 years straight. At the time I write this, it has about 1.8 million downloads on Download.com. |