Comment Main value is integration of scripts (Score 2, Insightful) 91
Konfabulator is an interesting thing, I think. Although most of the widgets are silly, I think it's mainly because everyone is trying it out and redoing the widgets thaty come with it (clock, to do lists, news aggregators, etc)
But it's main strength is that a developer can use applescript (or osascript) or javascript to make widgets. Given that via Applescirpt one can access the unix shell and most of the rest of the goodness under the hood of OS X, Konfabulator really has the potential to be a really nice cheap RAD for folks to make themsleves little system utilities.
The example of the server checker has been given. You can also write widgets to do whatever can be scripted on the platform, which is a lot. I've also seen a few widgets that run top every so many ticks and parse its output so that you have a readout of the 5 biggest processes. You could also write front ends for any command line utility in about 20 minutes, plus photoshop time.
Really once you see the software for it's underlying capability instead of the widgets that it comes with, you can see that it's really a pretty decent piece of ware.
But it's main strength is that a developer can use applescript (or osascript) or javascript to make widgets. Given that via Applescirpt one can access the unix shell and most of the rest of the goodness under the hood of OS X, Konfabulator really has the potential to be a really nice cheap RAD for folks to make themsleves little system utilities.
The example of the server checker has been given. You can also write widgets to do whatever can be scripted on the platform, which is a lot. I've also seen a few widgets that run top every so many ticks and parse its output so that you have a readout of the 5 biggest processes. You could also write front ends for any command line utility in about 20 minutes, plus photoshop time.
Really once you see the software for it's underlying capability instead of the widgets that it comes with, you can see that it's really a pretty decent piece of ware.
