Konfabulator doesn't suck compared to anything. Konfabulator is a good program on the Mac. On the PC, no one knows.  My point isn't that Konfabulator is bad. My point is that Konfabulator isn't compelling on the PC because there are other alternatives that already exist that have more features, cost less, and more support.

Incidentally, Konfabulator has nothing to do with Style XP. Konfabulator, for instance, actually does something. Something quite neat I think.  The closest thing to Konfabulator is Samurize. DesktopX is a superset of the two.

Agreed. Samurize is presently (as in today, already) a great program.

If Konfabulator, a $25 program, can beat Samurize, a free program, it will truly be a triumph of marketing.

Speaking of Z-order -- DesktopX objects can be desktop z-order. Nothing else I know of can do that.

That matters a lot when it comes to trying to create things that blend onto your desktop.

I don't think the fonts will be a significant issue.

I really should try to arrange an interview with Arlo for WinCustomize Magazine. What Arlo and Co. are doing is germane to WinCustomize after all. If Konfabulator gets popular enough on the PC, we would create a section for it just like we would for any program that has its own content format that needs a library.

But basically this is how Konfabulator works:

Konfabulator is a run-time that reads in .XML files. The .XML encapsulates a Javascript language with functions that are defined by Konfabulator. Most of the drawing is handled by Quartz, the rendering system on MacOS X.

Windows doesn't have Quartz. Also, a lot (most) Konfabulator widgets are doing system specific stuff.

In fact, here is the firt widget on their site:

Doing this on Windows isn't trivial. Look closely at this widget. It has a task list, RAM, idle team, and uptime.  Programs like DesktopX and SysMetrix do this but it involves considerable work jsut to do that. And this is just one type of thing that would have to be written. Bear in mind, the bulk of the work in a program like SysMetrix is in providing this functionality.  It took one of our developers some weeks to incorporate this kind of capability into DesktopX.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.  The biggest challenge will be doing the work Quartz provides on Windows.  DesktopX has DirectGUI. This took us 2 years to write. DirectGUI ~ Quartz (for our purposes).

In DesktopX, I can open up a script and write in Object.Rotate = 45 to rotate something 45 degrees. It can even be done in real time. How do you do that on Windows without a DirectGUI equivalent?

How are they going to handle cross platformness? Besides the aformentioend .DMG files and .SIT files which PC users don't deal with, even if these were made available as .ZIP, there would need to be flags to determine whether such a widget would work on Windows.  The weather object, for instance, could work fine on Windows. But what about all those widgets that have GUI controls? Are they going to re-implement them? DesktopX can do GUI widgets (check boxes, entry fields, etc.) easily because it can do ActiveX controls. Is Konfabulator going to be able to do ActiveX? Not likely, that alone would involve a LOT of work. And getting ActiveX to work with other things together is not trivial.

By now, you can probably see why, from a developer perspective, there is a lot of hair pulling when people say "Oh yea, Konfabulator on the PC is going to be great!"  Konfabulator is uniquely suited to the Mac. The Mac saves them immense amounts of development effort. On the PC, they'll have to now do all that work that the Mac saved them on if they want to have a chance.

And then, even after overcoming all those obstacles, even after all that effort, it still won't have the feature richness of Samurize or SysMetrix which are both freeware -- let alone get onto the same turf as DesktopX.

It has only gotten this far because of the free marketing ride popular Mac programs seem to get in the media.