I’ve never been a huge fan of the widget. The rest of the world is. From desktop widgets to web widgets, people just love to play around with tiny little programs. It reminds me of people that collect miniature stuff. It doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s small, it’s cute and people love it.
I was listening to the latest TWIT episode today at work and one of the guys on the show mentioned that the Weather application on the iPhone is exactly the same as the Yahoo! Weather widget. Then I saw an article on digg (sorry, I can’t seem to find it now) where a dude basically dove into a widget’s package and copied the code up to a server to access it on his iPhone via Safari.
Curiosity got the best of me so I ripped open one of my widgets to inspect its guts. Sure enough, it’s just html and javascript—which is what I’ve heard but never cared enough to bother looking at it.
Then I remembered at the last two Apple WWDCs Steve Jobs mentioned Dashcode to an underwhelmed audience. I thought for sure after the accouncement of Dashcode bombed at last year’s WWDC, it would be swept under the rug and left alone. So I was surprised at this year’s WWDC when he mentioned Dashcode again! Why, Steve, why do you keep mentioning Dashcode?!? No one cares!
I still don’t care, but at least I know why Steve keeps mentioning Dashcode. It’s all about the iPhone. For a while now Dashcode has been mentioned as one of those OS X Leopard things because apparently Apple is overhauling Dashboard, letting them freely sit on the desktop as opposed to the crazy layer on top of the desktop. It’s an illusion, Michael!
Dashcode is how Apple will extend the iPhone and allow 3rd Party developers to get their applications on the iPhone. Safari, as a browser, is not the platform per se, as people have been talking about. The Safari rendering engine is the key. That is what breathes life into these “applications.” The Safari browser is simply a “compiler” used by developers on both Mac and Windows platforms as a way to test their applications.
To bring it all together, the release of OS X Leopard (with Dashcode, Safari 3.0, iTunes 8, etc.) due in Q4 this year, Apple will also bring Widget Syncing via iTunes to the iPhone.
I’m also fully expecting a rebranding of iTunes into something more generic such as “iHub” or something equally generic that conjures up thoughts of syncing a myriad of digital content between multiple devices.
