Primordial Ooze

Dashboard: Everything you need in a dash

If you read my previous post on Konfabulator, you might be also interested to note (or already knew) about Apple's Dashboard. It's basically the same concept. For me, who uses a Mac G4 at home in addition to Windows desktops at home and at work, the cross-platform compatibility of Konfabulator is an obvious boon to someone like me.

However, John Gruber over at Daring Fireball had some strong words on Apple's Dashboard, saying,

Obviously, Apple ripped off the idea for Dashboard. Stolen wholesale, without even the decency to mention where they took the original idea.

However, John points out that the concept is much older of course. He claims that Dashboard and Konfabulator are different in that Konfabulator is:

Konfabulator = (Custom XML format) + (Custom JavaScript engine)

While Dashboard uses the built-in Javascript engine of  the Mac OS and renderes via HTML and CSS that's built into Safari web browser.

I hate to just repeat what John wrote so I encourage you to read his rant which was great for me since now I understand a bit more about how this is all built.

So, the essential difference is that Dashboard "gadgets" are simply web pages with some extra support for transparency at the edges. While Konfabulator constructs pages using the XML layout analogous to XAML and XUL. John rightly points out that the learning curve to write Dashboard apps should be lower than that of writing Konfabulator appls for this reason. Said another way, if you can write a web app then you can write a Dashboard app.

For me, of course, Konfabulator is more interesting because it's cross-platform. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this extra bit of detail.