- #MORE THINGS FOR MAC DASHBOARD MAC OS X#
- #MORE THINGS FOR MAC DASHBOARD MAC OS#
- #MORE THINGS FOR MAC DASHBOARD CODE#
Please, Mac web masters, exercise restraint. I pessimistically predict a proliferation of slider controls and rounded search fields on Mac-centric websites in the wake of Tiger's release. I see little value, and much danger, in allowing them to work in Safari by default. I wish the new, proprietary Web Kit features were confined to Dashboard where they are appropriate and useful. I side with the other web developers here. The new Web Kit features are also present in Safari, of course, and this has caused much controversy in the web developer community. There are two new controls (a slider and a rounded search field) plus a JavaScript interface to a subset of the Core Graphics API. Apple has also added a few new features to Web Kit in support of Dashboard widgets.
#MORE THINGS FOR MAC DASHBOARD MAC OS#
This allows them to interact with parts of the system that are not accessible from within a web browser (e.g., Mac OS X's built-in address book database). Dashboard widgets can be augmented with compiled Objective-C code. In fact, the Tiger version of Safari (2.0) can also be used to display and run widgets.ĭashboard goes a few steps further.
#MORE THINGS FOR MAC DASHBOARD CODE#
The widget description files are actually HTML pages, and the JavaScript code behaves just as it would if it was running inside a web browser.
Dashboard actually uses Web Kit, the engine that powers the Safari web browser, to run its widgets. Instead of purpose-build XML files and a custom JavaScript API, Dashboard uses HTML, CSS, DOM, and all the other technologies used in a modern web browser. The implementation details start to diverge from there, however. It too is an engine for running small programs called "widgets." Dashboard widgets are also bundles containing a description file, images and other resources, and JavaScript code to make the widgets actually work.
#MORE THINGS FOR MAC DASHBOARD MAC OS X#
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger includes a technology called Dashboard which is very similar to Konfabulator. There is a large and growing collection of user-contributed Konfabulator widgets. Like Kaleidoscope, the popular user interface theme engine for classic Mac OS which was also coauthored by Arlo Rose, Konfabulator is meant to be an environment for hosting user-created content. They can be interleaved with other windows, forced to float on top, or pushed back to the level of the desktop background. When running, widgets are self-contained windows that do not have a menu bar of their own. It's the "widget engine" that reads the bundles, parses the XML files, loads the resources, builds and displays the widgets' user interfaces, and runs the JavaScript code to make the widgets actually work. Konfabulator is an engine for running small programs called "widgets." A widget is a bundle that contains an XML description file, images and other resources used in the user interface, and JavaScript code to glue it all together.Īlthough Konfabulator ships with several useful widgets, the important part of the product is the Konfabulator application itself. In February of 2003, Arlo Rose and Perry Clarke released a new Mac OS X application called Konfabulator.
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