Engadget is providing superb
coverage of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference, currently in progress in San
Francisco. I’ll zero in on the bit that interested me the most – one of my hobby horses,
widgets (mini web apps).
At the conference Apple said there are currently 2500 widgets in Dashboard. They announced two
enhancements to that today.
Firstly Dashcode, which is a visual editor for HTML and CSS – enabling you to modify
templates to produce widgets (“we have templates for RSS, podcasts, images, whatever
you’re looking for.”).
The second new feature is Web Clip (same name as Google’s Gmail RSS
feature). Apple’s Web Clip enables you to “turn any part of a Web page into a
Widget”.
The summary: “With Dashcode, we have a way for developers to more easily create
widgets and with Web Clip, we can turn any piece of any Web page into a Widget.”
Sounds excellent and shows once again that Apple is right on top of the user
experience, as both of these features make it easy to create relatively complex mini web
apps for your desktop. Om Malik thinks
the web-connected widgets (and what isn’t web connected these days!) will be “a
bandwidth-using application”, but the reality is that’s where widgets are headed. Both desktop and Web – and in the near future connected to a whole host
of Internet devices too. e.g. TV, music players, even the proverbial future fridge. I
can’t wait till that sort of widget connectivity becomes more common.
Photo via Engadget
