Ever since Apple announced about the new features in their
latest Mac OS X, one feature that really caught attention is
Dashboard. Tiger Dashboard" Dashboard is home to widgets:
mini-applications that let you perform common tasks and provide
you with fast access to information. With a single click,
Dashboard appears, complete with widgets that bring you a world
of information — real-time weather, stock tickers, flight
information and more — instantly. Dashboard disappears just as
easily, so you can get back to what you were doing."
For a windows user like me, just can watch with envy the new eye
candy features in Mac OS X and wondering how I can have the same
feature on my belove windows.
Before Apple introduce dashboard in their latest Mac OS X, most
of mac users already can have widget on their desktop using
Konfabulator by Pixoria Inc. "Konfabulator is a JavaScript
runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little
files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want
them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you
your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes
for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local
weather."
And on November 2004, Pixoria has released Konfabulator 1.8 for
both Mac and Windows platform and its instantly bringing its
renowned OS X-based functions (and widgets!) to the ubiquitous
Windows platform. There is a small community in windows user
that love to change their default Windows look to Mac OS X and
with the availabilty of Konfabulator to run widgets, some of the
talented developers has started porting Tiger Dashboard to run
on windows using Konfabulator engine and the results is
tremendous.
And until today, quite a number of Dashboard Widgets has being
ported to run on windows using Konfabulator and other widget
engine like Avedesk, Kapsules, and Stardock DesktopX.
But most of the widgets, has being ported to run on Konfabulator
because the flexibility of Konfabulator engine to run various
kind widgets, just like Tiger Dashboard. Listed below, few
popular widgets that has being ported to windows.
1. Dashboard Weather Here is my first Konfabulator Widget. After
seeing a preview of Tiger (particularly Dashboard), reading
about a alternative for Windows (Konfabulator) and seeing the
great work of Saladin and Ghostwalker, I decided to make my own
contribution. So here it is, the konfab clone of the weather
widget.
2. World Clock World Clock Dashboard for Konfabulator. Based on
the Konfabulator WorldClock Pro by Ricky.
3. Sticky Notes Konfabulator clone of the Dashboard stickies
with extras
You can get more Dashboard Widgets for windows at
http://www.osx-e.com/downloads/dashboard/
About Author :
alang is a founder/owner of osx-e.com, a website about windows
to mac emulation that being around for 2 years
