Ideally someone else would write this article since I’m connected to DesktopX. But with all the enthusiasm over “widgets” lately and Konfabulator’s release
on Windows today, I’ve written up my best attempt at neutrality in looking at the pros of each program.
You may be bias, but you did write a good paper on Konfa VS DesktopX. It may be a good sale pitch too!
For me, I love and use WindowsBlind, tried DesktopX but find it to weird to use. In that respect, Konf is easyer.
I’ve been a Stardock customer for awhile, although admittdely, once this subscription period ends, I probably won’t re-up right away. This is partially due to my Mac becoming my primary machine, but also due to there not being as many recently improvements/advances as there were 2-3 years ago. I realize this is slightly off-subject, and I realize that this is probably due to running out of features to add, but you might bring it up at your next company meeting. I just don’t see the innovation happening at the same pace I previously did. Stardock is still the king of the desktop tweaking arena though!
As for Desktop X, I’ve gotta say that it is the most underused piece of Stardock software I own. Primarily due to the problems you mention in your article: Not enough direction, and too many widgets that I didn’t see worth wasting CPU cycles on.
I always wanted to develop for it, but again, the potential’s just so vague, I never could find a good enough reason to learn its nuances, mainly as I didn’t see that good of widgets coming out of it (As you pointed, there are some really nice ones tho’), so I guess I kinda assumed that was due to a steep learning curve, or a limited capability of the system. I just assumed that the lack of 3rd party “how-to” sites and info. was a bad indication. It didn’t really occur to me that there were others having the same set of questions/ponderances… that I should
I’ve always been able to see the potential of the Desktop X offerings, but there wasn’t that “must have” one that woulda kept me launching it at every boot. Plus, there’s too many Desktop-specific items, which are useless once you’ve got a few windows running, since they’re inaccesible. Cool stuff either way though!
Perhaps a better route for Konfabulator or DesktopX, would be to create an import feature for the competitions widgets. If I were a new buyer, and knew I could use any widget (meaning any Stardock or Konfabulator-based), that company would get my money over a company that could only play their specific plugins. Just a thought…
But then again, I’ve always wondered why no one’s created a StyleXP importer for Window blinds too. 8)=
Anyway… Good article, and if I were spending more time on the Windows box than the Mac, instead of the other way around, your article would have been enough to make me reconsider investigating DX some more.
Really nice article, would have been a nice touch to mention the other currently availible widget engines (kapsules http://kapsules.shellscape.org , avedesk http://www.avedesk.com/ and dotWidget http://k23productions.com (more are on the way).
If the developers of DesktopX wish to seriously compete with Konfabulator then they should port the software to OSX and not just Windows. For Linux users there is Super Karamba (formally Karamba) http://netdragon.sourceforge.net/ with several widgets available on sites such as kde-look.org to keep nearly everyone happy. As for Widget Wars I don’t think this is the case as most developers offering free software tools as these would rather work together than try to battle it out for king of the hill
Actually, have an article that compares all the widget programs already:
http://frogboy.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=27014
There is a lot of good content available for DesktopX and it comes with a lot of good stuff these days. It took awhile for it to start to try to shrink the polish gap.
Moreover, there really is a lot of on-line documentation available for DesktopX along with video tutorials, etc.
Documentation: http://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/resources.asp
I have been ObjectDockPlus user for the last two months, and I’ve subscribed to the full TotalGaming.net package which comes with StardockPanel. I’m using it at work, on my XP machine.
Since I’ve been an Linux/XFCE user, then and now Mac OS X iBook user (at home) I got used to the Dock better than the “Start Menu”. I use several programs – Firefox, Visual Studio, XCode, few others which I run mostly and for me the DOCK way works better than Start Menu.
Then I tried DesktopX, cause I needed CLOCK. The had only analog clock, and it was fine, but today my license expired. Luckily today I saw on osnews.com (here) the Konfabulator widgets (which I never used on my iBook) and installed them – they have also digital clock, but mainly they have FLOATING window mode which is important IMHO, and DesktopX misses it.
Basically FLOATING window makes your widget transparent to any mouse events. So I can have it over my Microsoft Visual Studio editor and still not obstruct me when selecting copy+past something. To be able to adjust it, I have to press F8 to go to the Konfabulator screen and adjust it from over there.
Basically I’m pleased, and I may buy Konfabulator only for.. the clock! No I might be kidding, but if it’s less than $19.99 i may actually do it
I start feeling that I’m really buying a CLOCK which does some good job. And then again I’m game developer, and probably I could write app like that (learn GDI+ I guess and few other things), but why! It’s already there…
One more rant about ObjectDockPlus – there seems to be a resource leak or something, and I’m not sure whether ODP is to blame or GDI+, but If I leave my machine for two-three days, then the ObjectDockPLus bar starts drawing really slow!
DesktopX has the same kinds of things, however. You can set an object to ignore mouse clicks. You can change the color of objects, you can bring them up hitting the F9 button or hide/show them with the F10 button.
As for ObjectDock, check out 1.05, we’ve been working on those kinds of issues for this release so hopefully it will do what you need it. We havne’t announced ODock 1.05 yet but it’s up now.
Please stop calling these applets widgets. It’s really irritating.
Widget is the new term. Just like ‘the web’ encompases the entire internet.
Get with the program guy!
Samurize does most, if not everything other applications do. I don’t know about its quality or capabilities as compared to others, but I do know that I would pay for it if that were required. It isn’t required though, because Samurize is free.
http://www.samurize.com
But what about the real widgets. It’s a bit confusing if you’re developping widgets for widgets. In my eyes a dropdown, button or tab is a widget, and a small application with a gui that does one specific task is an applet.
skin studio will import a stylesXP style and convert it to a WB skin, plus all the tweaks that styles xp lacks…
skin studio will import a stylesXP style and convert it to a WB skin, plus all the tweaks that styles xp lacks…
Thanks for the tip – I did not know that!
Malkia, here’s something I whipped up that talks about what’s new in Object Desktop this year (in response to your concern that Object Desktop hasn’t been innovating as fast as it used to):
http://www.stardock.com/products/odnt/media/
Buttons, scrollboxes, etc aren’t called widgets in the windows world, never have been. They’re called controls. Hence the confusion.
Give me Karamba. It’s clean, lightweight and has very nice widgets.
im with h_ank, on windows nothing beats samurize. its simple to configure in the basics (drag on drop, no need for codeing) while at the same time have the power to create allmost any effect
some people have even create samurize configs that have fold out menus just by useing the buildtin powers of the system and a bit of graphical trickery…
is the bestest.
but i think its got to be the easiest- right?
i’ll vote for samurize too
Konfabulator uses much memory on my system. When i got 4 widgets on desktops there are 5 tasks from konfabulator and they eat 30mb of ram away… with dotwidget there is much less use round about 10mb.
konfabulator uses too much ram. they must optimize something in the structure.
cheers, murphy
I noticed the same, also when I look in my taksmanager there are more instances of konfabulator running, all hogging more resources then any other aplication running.
My normal load on the memory is round 270mb with konf running it was up to 400mb.
Konfabulator uses hardly any CPU on my machines and works for what I wanted it to do..
I used the DesktopX and all the other programs on my laptop to make it look like a Mac for fun but it sucked down 25% of my CPU most times while Konfabulator is barely noticeable..
Memorywise I think DesktopX uses more but most of my machines run in the 2 gig range so this has never been a driving issue of mine.
so much simpler
Konfabulator uses a lot of memory….true
those ‘instances’ are widgets themself so you can run one and then see how much memory the next one eats…etc
i hope the next windows version will have better memory management (is this so memory hungry on mac too? any mac user to tell us?)
CPU usage and stability is the totally other thing
Here, Konfabulator shines and i have yet to find any other eyecandy that is so light on the cpu and stable (and the konspose effect is totally fabolous!)
So it’s CPU wise versus Memory wise, choose your poison
As for me….well you can always add memory to your system, and it’s recyceable to other tasks, as for stability and CPU, well:) any windows user knows
DesktopX uses very little CPU and in terms of memory, uses around 1/6th the amount of memory as Konfabulator currently does to do the same thing.
I can port a Konfabulator widget to DesktopX pretty quickly and do a real apples and apples comparison. I am sure Konfabualtor will evolve to be less resource hungry but then again, DesktopX will evolve as well.
Credit to the author for a fair and balanced article considering his ‘connections’ to destopx
Good job!