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 the Author
alang is a founder/owner of osx-e.com, a website about windows to mac emulation that being around for 2 years
