It has now been a little over a month since I picked up my replacement iBook, which I decided in the end to call wendigo. It came with OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) installed of course.
How has it been?
Well, faster. The CPU is around twice as fast as the old machine, and OS X 10.4 is reputedly quicker than 10.2.
The biggest difference has been in the widget runtimes though. I have been using Konfabulator for about a year now and AFAIK it is still the only viable option for Windows machines. But Dashboard, the widget runtime which Apple launched with Tiger, is just smoother and quicker.
So I would love to say that I will be using Konfabulator, but I will probably move to Dashboard full time instead.
Posted by Dunx at October 16, 2005 09:38 PM
What do you actually use your widget runtime for, though? I have a couple of things running in Dashboard for form's sake, but the only one I actually use at all is the dictionary, and even that quite infrequently.
You have of course pointed at the elephant in the room: what are widget runtimes useful for?
What I use them for is to hold small pieces of information or tools which I want to see quickly without arsing about with the task switcher. So on Dashboard I have the time in Britain, a calculator, and a nice little Wikipedia lookup tool. On Konfabulator I have a calendar for this month, and a clipboard history. I also have some todo list widgets that I use intermittently, and a flight tracker if I have visitors travelling.
There is a feature of Konfabulator which Dashboard is missing: the ability for widgets to intrude onto the normal desktop. So I will still be using K for some things, such as the analogue clock which I prefer to the OS X standard one.
The truth is that I would probably set aside a desktop for most of these things if OS X supported multiple desktops.