| Poll Results: Will you port your widgets to the Konfabulator framework? |
| You better believe it! |
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12% |
[ 1 ] |
| No way! |
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50% |
[ 4 ] |
| Boy, that's a tough one |
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37% |
[ 3 ] |
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| Total Votes : 8 |
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segdeha
Joined: 23 May 2005
Posts: 15
Location: Albuquerque, NM
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| Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 - 8:39 am Post subject: Yahoo! buys Konfabulator |
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According to MacWorld, Yahoo! has acquired Konfabulator, makers of those other widgets, and -- get this -- has decided to give it away!
Now, there will be a widget platform that reaches the "other 90%" in addition to loyal Mac users.
Will you be porting your widgets to work in Konfabulator?
-Andrew |
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galendw
Joined: 30 May 2005
Posts: 71
Location: Here.
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| Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 - 9:48 am Post subject: Re: Yahoo! buys Konfabulator |
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| segdeha wrote: | | Will you be porting your widgets to work in Konfabulator? |
For me it really depends on how easy the port is. If I have to start from scratch, I won't do it.
On the other hand if I only have to change a couple of things, I probably will.
For now, though, I'm just going to wait and see.
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Ludge
Joined: 09 May 2005
Posts: 98
Location: UK
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| Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 - 11:45 am Post subject: |
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Don't forget that the Konfabulator system is a fair bit different to the Dashboard one. It will probably be difficult to port the widget.whatever() calls.
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BatteryInfo widget
AdiumList widget. |
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Inventive
Joined: 24 May 2005
Posts: 1
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| Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 - 1:16 pm Post subject: Re: Yahoo! buys Konfabulator |
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It would be great if someone out there who has experience with developing both Konfabulator and Dashboard widgets put out some sort of "porting guide".
It'd be a sure way to get a ton of traffic.  |
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GrannySmith
Joined: 05 May 2005
Posts: 21
Location: Belgium
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| Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 - 3:10 pm Post subject: |
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I don't port my widgets... but if someone want's to port my widgets I will help with the port...
but the technology behind K is very different than D... I'll wait and see if the K guys add WebCore to K  ... than it must be easier i guess |
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andrethegiant
Joined: 08 May 2005
Posts: 78
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| Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 - 3:28 pm Post subject: |
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| At first, I voted no way, but now that I think about it i think i will. Look how many times they have been downloaded at widgetgallery.com! It's common to find a widget downloaded 20,000+ times. |
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Ludge
Joined: 09 May 2005
Posts: 98
Location: UK
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| Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 - 5:09 pm Post subject: |
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| andrethegiant wrote: | | At first, I voted no way, but now that I think about it i think i will. Look how many times they have been downloaded at widgetgallery.com! It's common to find a widget downloaded 20,000+ times. |
That's quite impressive. Mind you, Sean's Wikipedia widget has (at time of writing) 16,000+ downloads from this site alone!
That isn't including the traffic from Apple which (in my own experience) is an order of magnitude greater. Then there's all the other tracking sites. That's a lot of bandwidth.
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BatteryInfo widget
AdiumList widget. |
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segdeha
Joined: 23 May 2005
Posts: 15
Location: Albuquerque, NM
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| Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 - 10:07 pm Post subject: OT: bandwidth = ouch! |
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| Ludge wrote: | | That's a lot of bandwidth. |
Tell me about it! For a little while my SlideShow widget was the featured widget on Apple and my bandwidth usage went through the roof! I had to upgrade my account for July and have moved all of my actual widget files to an el-cheapo web host. (It didn't help that the widget was over 1 MB in size.)
I do plan to port a couple of widgets over, if just for the challenge of it. I've looked at creating Konfabulator widgets before and it's definitely not as straightforward as creating Dashboard widgets. But, I think the added exposure is worth it!
-Andrew |
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BagOfHammers
Joined: 03 Jul 2005
Posts: 167
Location: under the lucky hippo tree
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| Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2005 - 12:33 pm Post subject: |
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Sounds like that Konfabulator guy was pretty angry at Apple for allegedly taking his idea(s)...
Am I the only one that feels like the Dashboard community is better off being relatively small? I feel like this is a quantity versus quality problem, to a degree. Granted, more people downloading your widgets is great, assuming that will be possible in the near future through Konfabulator. But from the downloading side, users who are like me might feel that having such a large number of widgets will lower standards. I personally imagine more widgets like I've seen in the Konfabulator website, which personally I don't feel look very decent at all, often lacking sufficient features, although I can't say much because due to this impression I got, I've never used Konfabulator. (Silly name anyway ).
I guess I'm imagining that just as widgets are sub-apps, they will reflect the app world of Mac and Windows.... For me, the majority of Windows and Windows/Mac software are not nearly as well-designed and useful as the majority of Mac-only software. What I'm thinking is, as the Macworld article says, more widgets able to be used on Mac will be from developers also aimed at Windows, or worse, developers that don't even know Mac very well. I don't want to welcome what I feel is Windows shabiness and incompleteness to my Mac. I don't really think there will be increased productive competition, so I'm not betting on such "Yidgets" to become somehow better than Dashboard widgets.
In any case, it does mean that some good widgets will be offered to Windows, which is nice, if they do figure out some porting tool. But, for this kind of thing, I like small communities where communication and developer-user understanding is tight, which I think helps lead to better widgets, than large communities overwhelmed by too much mess. It depends on HOW it's done, not just what.
As long as developers want to improve widgets, it'll be ok, right? |
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