Say goodbye to your browser! Push is the future!

[mmcirvin]

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.

Comments

Push never worked before...

[(Anonymous)]

Push was tried before - it's a technology looking for a market. Nobody wanted it then (dial-up prevented most from "enjoying" it) and nobody really wants it now (most Winduhs users' machines are already running so many unknown processes their systems are practically useless).

The only "push" technology ever found to be useful is the face of a watch. You merely glance at the device and, lo and behold, there's the information you wanted!

Pull, not push

[(Anonymous)]

The user is still pulling, or requesting, the information. Directly or indirectly through settings.

Pull was a dot com boom word that only makes sense in an internal corporate sense. Everyone else doesn't want to have what they see dictated by outside forces.

Re: Pull, not push

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the thing. What "push" meant to investors that you were going to control eyeballs, and the Internet was going to turn into something more like TV. But part of the big attraction with something like a Dashboard widget is that you can skim off the forty bytes of information you want without also getting a truckload of banner ads.