Dashboard, Baby! Oh Yeah, and Bridge!

No, I'm not talking about the Blogger "Dashboard" through which I passed on my way to making this post. I'm talking about the Tiger (that's MacOS X 10.4, for those out there with the misfortune not to have experienced it yet) widget execution environment.

To clarify, widgets look like miniature applications—think of the little things like clocks and calculators that have been bundled with every GUI OS for decades—but which are made with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Other technologies, including those that are based on UNIX command-line code and MacOS system-level programs and protocols, as well as anything almost else one might dump into a web page, may also be used, but economies of file size and function are both goals when designing these things.

Widgets, however, unlike web pages, do not (though they may in most cases) execute in a browser. They execute in the Dashboard environment, which users can show and hide with hot keys or activation corners. Yeah, there are over 800 widgets we Tiger users can download via Apple's web site, and a few more kicking around the internet and on private machines. However, that's not the fun part.

Since widgets can be used for almost any little task out there, the possibilities are fairly extensive (if it weren't for copyright issues, I would make a widget of Eno's Oblique Strategies cards, though perhaps I can look into that). Anyone with a little web design background—or willing to take a couple days to learn the basics—can design widgets. In light of that fact, I took my (limited) background and put it to the test.

I have now almost completed my first widget. I wrote the bulk of the code on Sunday, polished it Monday, and am tweaking the interface now. I'm going to need some help with that last part, but I already put out the call. What, you may ask (shyeah, as if I haven't bored the poor Windows and *NIX users yet) did I do? I made a widget to calculate duplicate bridge scores, of course. Yeah, it's useless to most people. Oh well. It was fun. I learned more about bridge scoring. I'm happy. When the interface is finished, we'll see if Apple will host downloads. Fingers crossed.

*UPDATE*
Apple's site has the Oblique Strategies widget already. See? I have good ideas. Of course, the sad part is that I missed the fact it was there for three weeks, which is longer than I have had Tiger.