David Emery OnlineOn Pricing and Site Design
16 June 2005
Yesterday WidgetMachine launched, a site from the people behind MacThemes , devoted to Dashboard widgets.
The site is notable for two things; it’s innovative design and also for their decision to charge for widgets – I’ll talk about that first before moving onto the site design.
Now, the widgets that they have up on the site are quite nice aesthetically (they’ve obviously got a whole heap of good designers), but they are still the normal motley crew of dashboard widgets; with cpu monitors, iTunes controllers etc. I don’t quite understand why anyone would want to spend money ($5-$6 at the time of writing) on something, by their very nature, supposed to be small and unobtrusive little gadgets. I certainly wouldn’t spend that sort of money on a normally application of the same functionality.
It’ll be interesting to see if they move forward with their widget selling idea – I really can’t see them selling enough to be profitable, but if they can it will certainly be an eye opener (If people are willing to spend $5 on a widget that – other then looking nice – does nothing that can’t be found elsewhere for free, what else are they willing to spend $5 on?).
I personally I’m a bit disappointed; the site originally was going to launch with the release of Tiger, from what I’ve read it seems to have been postponed to add the charging scheme (I may, however, be wrong – but it’s the feeling I get from reading around).
Anyway, enough of being down on them; the site itself rocks! Apart from the aesthetics design, which is beautiful, the site is a real poster child for modern web technologies, using transparency, animation and the like whilst still all being done using xhtml, css and javascript. The interface itself behaves like a desktop app, and it all works really well.
This is where the web is going – this is what the future of the internet looks like, hopefully more companies start building their sites like this.