Manufacturing Widgets

Dashboard is Apple’s desktop widget feature due in Mac OS X Tiger. Developing Dashboard Widgets shows how wonderfully simple (for any competent web developer) creating widgets is, but unfortunately I’d need $500 and a spare Mac to start playing around with them now.

Building widgets for Konfabulator is similar in many ways, with JavaScript as the scripting language but XML instead of (X)HTML & CSS for layout. Dashboard may offer more power and fewer headaches, as it won’t have cross-platform concerns (e.g. when using shell commands), but it should be straightforward for developers to release simple widgets for both systems.

Konfabulator is already freely available and gaining new fans amongst Windows users, so perhaps developing widgets for it is also the best way to prepare for Dashboard? I think I’ll do a bit more research…

Sat 11th Dec 2004, 9:04pm GMT

Filed under: Client-side Coding, Software

Comments

Ahh, the lovely Konfabulator, it is great at what it does.
I have one or two widgets planned, but never seem to find the time to sit down with the docs and learn how to write them. If you do, let me know how you get on and it might spur me in to action.

— Paul Silver, 15th Dec, 5:33pm

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