What have I been doing lately you ask? I've been creating widgets for the upcoming Mac OS x Tiger release. My company bought a developers liscence, and off I go, charting unfamiliar territory with only a handful of websites out there to help me in my quest.
What is a widget you might ask? Its the bridge that gaps web development and regular software development. Widgets are essentially safari webpages that are executed on the widget dashboard. Why is this useful??? Think of it this way. You are a busy person, you want to know the weather, you want to see your stocks, you want a todo list, you want to see if you have any new email, you want to have a dictionary available. How can you accomplish this? Conventionally you would have a program for each of these tasks, or you would have to write your own script that would access all of this data. Widgets are more like the latter than the former, except you don't have to have your browser open, and that many of these mini programs have already been written for your pleasure.
In addition to that I have been working with the XmlHttpRequest javascript object. Who out there thinks that javascript only offers cheesy dynamic content? (oohh, mee!) Well, its seems as thought there has been a paradigm shift due to whats being done in google labs (google suggest & google maps). XmlHttpRequest is a way for your site to dynamically talk to a webpage without a refresh. This opens up the door for live autosuggest, or live webpage manipulation. Its a pretty neat concept (and yet an old one).
So that's what I've been up to lately.
Posted by kposey at March 28, 2005 03:15 PM | TrackBackI have been using widgets on DESKTOP X for a while now, they're neat.
Posted by: James at March 28, 2005 04:39 PM