I'm tired of the whole Konfabulator/Dashboard thing. Yes, they look eerily familiar. Yes, they both make it easier to create little applets. Yes, it's a little bit easier to create a Dashboard thingamajig than a Konfabulator whatchamabob. They both fail.
Back in the classizoic age, there was this thing called OpenDoc, a component framework developed by Apple, IBM, and others. This was circa 1996 when Apple was rudderless, but still producing some great tech (OpenDoc, Newton, V-Twin). Cyberdog was Apple's manifestation of the OpenDoc technology. I've always struggled to explain just how cool Cyberdog was. Maybe that's part of the reason why it never really took off. To put things in context, this was back in the middle of the browser wars, when sites had Netscape Now banners and you routinely had to switch from one browser to another just to load the page (as opposed to today where some sites just look different depending on which browser you're using). In that world, convincing people to use a little known browser on a minority OS just wasn't feasible.
Now that I think about it, Cyberdog was one of the first embeddable html renderers. I don't think 'embeddable html renderer' was in most people's vocabulary 8 years ago. In retrospect, I should have tried a photoshop/illustrator analogy with the art student. You launch Cyberdog and you have this empty canvas and tools palette. Instead of drawing tools in that palette, you have a Web Browser, a Mail Reader, a News Reader, a Text Editor, a Picture Viewer, etc. You drag a browser to your document and type in a url. You drag a newsreader into your document and type in a newsgroup name. You point a mail reader to one of your mailboxes. Move them around a resize them.
Now, you might ask, why would I want to do that? I would be glad that you asked because it would give me a chance to wax nostalgic about all the cool documents I made. I used to be on a few mailing lists and newsgroups devoted to science fiction. New releases, reviews, discussions, those sorts of things were the topics in those forums. I had a mailbox for that mailing list, so I threw it in a document along with a newsreader for that newsgroup. I threw in a web page that reviews of new releases. I threw in a text editor that pointed to my reading list. Voila, a dashboard for my reading habits. I didn't have to create any html/xml/javascript widgets, I just dragged and dropped and entered url's
My favorite example is one I created for a Classics paper on the Aeneid/Odyssey/Inferno. An editor for my paper, a browser pointing to MIT's online text version of the Aeneid for quote searching, and a browser pointing to an online dictionary/thesaurus. It was probably the best paper I wrote in college, and not because I'd read each book 3 times before taking that class, but because I didn't lose my train of thought while context switching from original text, to dictionary, to paper, and so on and so forth. It was a really efficent way to work because I was able to create the exact workspace that would benefit me the most.
I was never able to convince people to use it, and OpenDoc was killed off when Apple killed off technologies right and left when it acquired NeXT. There was also a pretty steep learning curve to build a custom OpenDoc component. However, there was almost no ramp up to creating these compound workspaces, these dashboards if you will.
Back to Konfabulator and Dashboard and their doohickeys, it's all about taking information that changes and displaying it in a useful way. The first web page i created was all about server side includes so I could gather all the info i wanted in one place. Then came the whole personalized portal craze. I played with One Click and PreFab Player to create widgets and use the one's other people made.I was a Cyberdog junkie. I played with Konfabulator when it came out, but for all the prettiness of (some people's) Widgets, it's clunky. I also think it's a lot harder to create a Widget than a Cocoa application, but that's probably because I'm a coder, not an artist. Honestly, I think this was where Konfabulator failed. It's not extensible. While Konfabulator might be innovative on some level (and I believe it is innovative, just not original), one can notbe truly innovative when creating a Widget because you're limited to the toys Arlo and Perry give you. With Dashboard, we get the display possibilities of HTML+ and browser plugins, and the coding possibilities of the entire Cocoa framework (which pretty much means the entire OS). It will be cool, not just pretty.
It's been argued that there are really only seven types of stories authors can write. I think there's a similar heuristic for computer applications. Every program is derivative of something, just like in literature, just like in music, just like in food. I'm damn glad you can't patent those seven stories, a drum beat, and using garlic in food.