Say goodbye to your browser! Push is the future!

Apple's Dashboard is often compared to Konfabulator, but with the wealth of widgets that suck things off the Internet, it strikes me that it could also be seen as Pointcast done right or, perhaps more accurately, Windows Active Desktop reborn: compare and contrast.

I don't have any direct experience of Active Desktop, but Dashboard already seems to be generating more excitement than it did. What's the difference? Is it just that Internet bandwidth is cheaper and more people have an always-on connection now (people mostly used PointCast at work and HR often had to ban it because it hogged office bandwidth), or is it a GUI difference (maybe the simple fact that all the widgets live in a separate layer and go away when you don't need them) or ease of development? These people have been discussing this...

Having used Dashboard for a while, I think a key thing (actually shared by most predecessors) is that, dumb old Wired articles notwithstanding, it doesn't try to replace the browser. You can't do that much with a widget, nor would you want to. It's simple enough, and the Dashboard layer is unobtrusive enough, that you can just keep it up there all the time.

The good ones seem to be divided into two categories: widgets that just display some information with no regular user interaction, and widgets on the Dictionary model that have a search bar and a little display that windowshades down (often with a button to get more information in your Web browser if you need it). The third-party widgets that are nothing but a search bar that opens Safari seem less useful. If I just want to open a web page in Safari I'm not going to bring up the Dashboard first; I'll just put a bookmark in Safari.

Wide angle and narrow angle

When I was younger I decided that my brain operated in two distinct modes, which I thought of as "wide angle" and "narrow angle" (I think the only time I ever used these terms publicly was in a poem I wrote for a school assignment in the seventh grade). I meant the terms quite literally; in wide angle I was more able to notice things going on in my peripheral vision than in narrow angle. In wide angle I'd be itching for some kind of social interaction, willing to try new things, a joker, very talkative and sometimes irritatingly pushy; in narrow angle I'd stick to routine, not talk much, and concentrate on studying or making one thing for hours on end (with little ability to control what thing it was).

What strikes me now is my unwillingness to make value judgments about one state being better than the other. I didn't think of myself as depressed or upset when in narrow angle, though people looking at me would often think I was worried or sad about something and ask me what was wrong, and doubtless some psychoanalyst might insist I was actually sad and simply didn't consciously realize it. Certainly modern American society highly prizes wide-angle behavior. I didn't think of either state as undesirable—narrow angle could be a tremendously productive state if I happened to be fixated on something useful—though I was sometimes annoyed at my inability to switch my head between the two states at will. Wide angle and narrow angle would come and go without warning. And they still do today.

They correspond pretty closely to the conventional notions of introversion and extraversion, I suppose, though those are usually spoken of as personality types rather than moods. Maybe the personality types really just indicate the length of each part of the cycle.

Anyway, I now present these terms for general use.