“Google has announced the official release of Desktop Gadgets for Linux and is distributing the source code under the open-source Apache software license. Although there are still bugs and the implementation is not yet entirely complete, it works well enough for day-to-day use.”
A kick in the nuts for plasma.
Not at all, Plasma is not about just widgets, it IS the desktop and they are themable on top.
Give me plasma anyday, can’t beat the integration, themes and flexibility of it.
Yeah, but at the end what the user sees are the widgets.
Too bad Plasma isn’t compatible with OS X widgets…
Oh wait, they’ve been working on that haven’t they?
But are plasma widgets compatible with OSX?
Oh yeah, they aren’t.
You may want to read this then http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-gadgets.html
That would mean more people writing Google Gadgets and less people writing plasma gadgets or plasmoids.
For cross desktop/OS compatibility I would choose to program Google Gadgets.
If google gadgets integrate into Plasma, I don’t see how that would necessarily be a bad thing for Plasma.
Why do you always take so much pleasure in the potential (but usually unlikely) failure of an open source project?
what?
Google gadgets is open source.
If you’d know better what Plasma is all about you would come to a different conclusion.
In fact, Google is looking into Plasma:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-gadgets-for-linux-dev/browse_…
Regards Harry
http://groups.google.com/group/google-gadgets-for-linux-dev/browse_…
“Actually, we have written some code which can let Google gadgets running as plasmoids. “
this is not true for a few reasons. first off, google gadget devs are working on plasma integration. that means that due to having a widget canvas as part of the desktop, one will be able to use google gadgets without having to grab add ons that don’t really integrate very well with the rest of the system.
it also means you can mix and match with other widget types out there in one canvas. no more having to choose.
but most importantly, plasma is not just a way to write widgets, it’s a way to present them, manage them, build workflow out of them and get access to advanced features you just don’t get elsewhere.
not to mention i haven’t exactly seen a taskbar, pager, application launcher, battery monitor, etc coming from these other widget systems.
with plasma we’re trying to create a universal canvas, both for whatever content you want to put in it as well as for whatever sort of device you want to put it on.
i think it’s a bit unfortunate we have so many widget systems and i don’t think in the long term many of them will ever really “matter”, but at least with plasma we have a way around the mutual exclusivity of them while also having good integration and advanced functionality.
The way I see it is that for example, I wan’t to write a widget that shows X functionality, I have two options:
1: A plasmoid, the advantages are the integration with KDE4, ann some extra presentation goodies like rotation (not terrible useful), I get to use the plasma data engines to get the result, but the disadvantages would be: It wouldn’t be cross desktop. inclusive won’t be cross OS.
2. A Google gadget, no plasma data engine? no problem, the plasma engines is just a layer anyway, I can skip that layer and go directly to the data (dbus anyone?).
Advantages: Desktop,OS agnostic.
And when someone saids:
“I got Y widget in my plasma desktop”, then someone else would say “I got the same one in my Windows machine, so what’s cool about it?”.
If I can get pretty much the same results with Google widgets then I’d use them.
As I see it and is just my very personal opinion, plasma won’t be the woow factor anymore.
BTW, teh battery monitor widget is a bad example, I have one in my desktop (XP right now) with Google Widgeds and a pager widget too, and is not plasma.
Edited 2008-06-06 16:42 UTC
I’d summarise the situation as follows:
1) Google Gadgets get integrated into Plasma. This is a win for *Plasma*, as it now has a much richer array of widgets that it can host, in a nice, integrated fashion (maybe even via KHotNewStuff!), some of which might be “must-haves” for people currently using $OTHER_PLATFORM
2) The open-sourcing of Google Gadgets may or may not be a loss for *Plasmoids* (that is, widgets that are inherently tied to the Plasma framework), in that Google Gadgets might prove more enticing to widget writers (although if this is the case, said widgets will still run under Plasma).
Whether or not this is indeed a “kick in the nuts” for Plasma depends on whether or not the Plasma devs are more interested in Plasmoids or … well … in Plasma
I’d also re-iterate what aseigo said about the nature of Plasmoids: we’ve been conditioned to think of widgets are pretty little displays and meters that sit on the desktop (and the desktop only) and offer only basic and rather superficial interactivity, but the fact is that in Plasma, really core functionality is given by Plasmoids – your menu, your taskbar, your system tray, your panels, your desktop itself – all Plasmoids, that will (eventually) be able to be downloaded and swapped around as you please.
A speculative but wholly plausible scenario: you like most of KDE, but prefer the GNOME splitting of menus into System, Apps etc – that’s OK, as there is a Plasmoid that mimics this functionality in KHotNewStuff! You want your desktop to look and – critically – *behave* – like this mockup:
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/New+desktop+(mockup)?content=66984
with that neat “last files used with this app from this group” functionality that KDE doesn’t support? No problem – there’s a little bundle of these Plasmoids – a Plasma Total Conversion, if you will – that mimic all of this functionality, or let you pick and choose the aspects that you want!
When thinking of Plasmoids, we shouldn’t necessarily be thinking of stock tickers or weather displays, but of Firefox extensions which actually add very non-trivial functionality like mouse gestures or more configurable tab behaviour for control freaks, etc.
I repeat, plasma is just for KDE4, Google gadgets are desktop/OS agnostic, so with GG Im tied to KDE to work in a gadget.
GG would be better for someone because is not tied to KDE,GNOME or anyone.
Hiev, you seem to be completely missing the point here.
GG is not bad for plasma. If you tie in more available widgets to the framework with the full desktop integration, how can that be anything but a positive?
Plasma != Plasmoid
What you’re focused on is the Plasmoid API, a very small part of the larger Plasma project. Perhaps it’s a bit less important, but I think it still has some advantages if you are only concerned about KDE. If you want a cross-platform widget, then it certainly isn’t the way to go and it never was.
You should be thinking of it as an alternative Plasmoid API that happens to be cross-platform (while loosing some of the niceness the original API had). How would that have been a negative if the Plasma developers had added it and given developers the choice?
Edited 2008-06-06 18:01 UTC
Plasma will be able to integrate Google widgets. Great. No problem. However, if you want to write something a bit better and more useful than yet another daft RSS news ticker that no one reads anyway, then Plasma is what you want.
Like what?
Edited 2008-06-06 22:40 UTC
Something that intergrates into your desktop rather than sitting there looking good.
As We’ve said, widgets give useful information but they dont interact like panels, menus ect and are themable like Plasma is.
Plasma has panels which you can add widgets into them, yes the panel is already a widget, see?
Edited 2008-06-06 23:28 UTC
Errrr, these things called applications…………. You know, stuff that actually attracts people to your platform? You can’t create any decent applications with Google gadgets that integrate with your desktop in any real way.
For that case you shouldn’t use a plasmoid but a normal window.
Edited 2008-06-08 04:41 UTC
I can’t wait to try this out on XFCE. I wonder if it has Gnome dependencies. Anyone try it out on XFCE?
Why all the widget systems? They’re not that great that everyone needs to be making a program to do that same thing!
Why all the widget systems?
You pose a good question, what it is up with all the desktop widgets. I first tried Gnome desklets, then Adesklets. On Windows XP I tried out yahoo’s widget engine. I currently find my desktop without widgets. I didn’t find too much use for them and if you added a lot of them the processor activity skyrocketed, with the exception of Adesklets which used less resources. Some of them are useful like a desktop RSS readers and network activity. The big analog clock, while cool looking, is not really any more useful than having a text readout on a panel. My guess is the eye candy effect. It just looks cool to have a desktop customized. When I worked in marketing the sales people would tell me to make it more “sexy,” so it looked elegant and cool, captivating to users.
I’ve never really found a use for widgets, or desklets, or screenlets, or whatever your chosen marketing overlord calls them. I have a clock next to my notification tray. I have an RSS ticker in Firefox (or I did with Firefox 2. I don’t know if it’s been updated yet). I just don’t see a need for widgets. Sure, the KDE desktop is based on them, but what’s the use of anything other than the icon widget?
I’ve used Apple’s Dashboard (widget desktop) and it worked in Tiger (10.4.x) by sucking up most of the available resources but it was cute and suddenly, Mac fanatics had to have widgets to tell them when to run to the toilet. “Shiny things…ooooooo.” I haven’t run the process since the first few weeks.
There are good reasons to have them, I’m sure because you can do a lot of tedious things with them, but I can still write a quick application or use a browser to get to the information I need.
Translating between the different types is the big deal now. The most popular widget could be the one that makes them all work automatically…everywhere.
The weather widget is useful. Or it would be if we didn’t have windows.
I have a clock and load monitor in the tray, and conky (windowed, not inty-grated with the desktop) for a system monitor — which gives you better information than any collection of desklets, in a better format, without becoming an all-consuming behemoth and also killing your pets, if any.
I used to install konfabulator on win32 and gdesklets on linux. But after a period of time, you outgrow it
90% of the time, I work on tabbed environments, be it browser or desktop apps. And I have this 8-10 putty windows and one putty connection manager with more tabs open.
For a clock? I look on the system tray.
Everything old is new again.
Remember epplets? Dockapps? It’s the same.
Today I use gkrellm, as I have for years, to display various meters (net, disk, cpu, ram, etc), mail notification, weather, a clock and what-have-you. It sits always-visible on my screen and my windows don’t max over it.
Gadgets, to the extent that they are gkrellm, are useful to me, but take up too much space. The web integration offers some interesting possibilities. The browser-type API makes coding new ones easier, I suppose. But in the end there’s nothing revolutionary here, just the same thing rehashed one more time.
That said, Plasma is interesting. Best dock apps since windowmaker.
My only widget (a screenlet, in fact) is a yellow note sticker sitting in the upper right corner of the desktop. I’ve tried many RSS and calendar widgets and they ALL sucked bigged time. Some were too small by default and went all nuts when resized, the rest being buggy and utter crap even on default settings. At least awfully ugly if nothing else.
I pretty much dislike this yellow note widget (Simple Note) too, since it allowes me to erase text only in the reversed order I wrote it. The default note screenlet was even worse (don’t remember how, but it was). I just never remember to buy a bunch of real papery note stickers, since I can’t take this virtual one with me to the shops.
Edited 2008-06-06 08:43 UTC
Widgets can be a very frustrating business. I’ve been through the same issues with GKrellM, SuperKaramba, Screenlets, and even Plasmoids during a brief dabbling: poor QA. You spend ages sifting through a huge collection of candidates–the vast majority of which just do the same six things–and find yourself ditching countless ones that just don’t work before finding one that’s reasonably close to what you wanted. Even then, the implementation may be a bit shy of your ideal.
The reason I’ve stuck with superKaramba, while it’s far from perfect, is that it comes with peer-review of the available widgets built-in. Go to “Find hot new stuff” and look at the most popular ones, there’s a reasonable chance that they actually work. I hope that Plasma will keep this tradition, as I often think of some type of widget I’d love to have on my desktop, but the idea of questing for one can be so horrifying I don’t bother.
I applaud the move but that’s one too many of those indeed.
Plus Linux users have panel applets which are much more useful.
The only desktop thingy I kept so far is conky, now that it supports aliased font, it looks good and still is light on CPU usage for a resource monitor.