freeform goodness

Konfabulator looks like it could be a pretty cool application. The marketing tag for it is “whatever you want it to be”, but perhaps the simplest way to describe it is as a javascript runtime engine with hooks into Quartz. What that means in real terms is that you can write little desktop applets, or rather “widgets” (the developer’s term) that can interact with the local machine, or web services, and they can take advantage of all anti-aliasing, transparency, and all that other cool stuff.

The sample widgets are the sorts of things you might expect — clocks, stock tickers, battery gauges, calendars: sort of a GKrellM on steroids. I can’t wait to see what happens when developers realize that they can plug essentially any webservice into this nice rendering engine — imagine the sorts of things people can do with things like the data sources Watson and Sherlock 3 use?

I’m eager to play around with this stuff and try my hand a making widgets, but their website, as I write this, is pretty hammered and I haven’t been able to get to the devkit.

I think one of Microsoft’s rare big blunders has been the way they’ve marketed .Net. Instead of showing people how cool desktop applications with a webservices backend can be, early on they fumbled the ball and got blindsided by negative public opinion on software subscription fees, product activation, and Passport centralized personal information. They made a crucial error by calling everything they released “.Net”, even when the product in question had nothing to do with web services. On the other hand, small developers have done all kinds of cool things with XML-RPC and related technologies.

:: Dave Walker 12:30 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags: applications

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