Dashboard (software)
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Dashboard is an application for Apple Computer's Mac OS X 10.4 operating system, "Tiger," used for hosting mini-applications known as widgets. It is a semi-transparent layer that is invisible to the user unless activated by a hotkey, which can be set to the user's preference.
When Dashboard is activated, the user's desktop is dimmed and widgets fade into the foreground. Like application windows, they can be moved around, rearranged, deleted, and recreated (so that more than one of the same Widget is open at the same time, possibly with different settings). New widgets can be opened, via a menu bar, by dragging their icon out into the layer. After loading, the widget is ready for use.
Creation of Dashboard widgets
Dashboard widgets are created using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript. Because the same programming languages are used for creating websites, many web developers can already build them. Widgets themselves are, at the core, simply HTML files that are displayed within the Dashboard layer; they use the WebKit application framework that is also used in Apple's Safari web browser, meaning even users running earlier versions of Mac OS X- where Dashboard is unavailable- can build them.
When a Dashboard widget is built, it usually consists of six files:
- The widget's HTML file, which is the actual file that will be displayed in the Dashboard layer
- The widget's CSS file, which is used for styling the widget (but is called on from the HTML file)
- The widget's JavaScript file, although it may be implemented directly within the HTML file if the developer desires
- The widget's Property List (called “Info.plist”), which is what Dashboard uses to load the widget’s properties (i.e.: name, version, HTML file, etc.)
- The background image of the widget, in PNG format
- The icon that is displayed in the menu bar
Widget Functions and Capabilities
Dashboard widgets, like web pages, are capable of many different things, often times to perform tasks that would be tedious or complicated for the user to access manually. One example is the Google Search widget, which simply opens up the user's browser and performs a Google search. Other widgets, like Wikipedia, grab the contents of webpages and display them within Dashboard. Some widgets can also serve as games, using Macromedia Flash (or another multimedia authoring program) to create games just as if they were in a browser.
Graphical Aspects of Dashboard
Dashboard uses a variety of graphical effects for displaying, opening, and using widgets. For instance, a 3-D flip effect is used to simulate the widget flipping around (where a user may change the preferences); other effects include cross-fades from icon to body (when opening widgets), or a suck-in effect when they are closed. On sufficiently powered Macs, widgets will produce a ripple effect when they are opened, like a leaf falling onto water. Some users believe that these effects are taxing and superfluous, consuming CPU resources, but with the help of OS X’s Quartz Extreme and Core Image graphics architectures, sufficient computing power to render them in real time is available.
Dashboard vs. Konfabulator
Dashboard has been widely compared to Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widget Engine) as a copy of it, due to the similarities between their graphical aspects and that they both use the term “widgets” to describe the objects that operate within their environments. Although Konfabulator was released before Dashboard, Dashboard is based on Apple’s Desk Accessories, first released in 1984 with the original Macintosh.[link] Desk Accessories, similar to widgets, were small mini-applications that operated on a user’s desktop, but disappeared in later versions of Mac OS. (In fact, the Calculator desk accessory remained in the Mac OS up until OS 9, 17 years without an update). The code bases for Konfabulator and Dashboard are also different: whereas Konfabulator uses XML and JavaScript to generate Widgets, Dashboard uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Objective C.
Included Widgets
At first, Apple included 14 widgets with Mac OS X 10.4 - 10.4.3. They consisted of:
- Address Book
- Calculator
- Calendar
- Dictionary
- Flight Tracker
- iTunes Controller
- Phone Book
- Stickies
- Stocks
- Tile Game
- Translation
- Unit Converter
- Weather
- World Clock
Apple also highly encourages developers to build their own widgets; many Dashboard-related sites provide downloads to collections of different widgets. Currently, Apple’s own Dashboard page and [DashboardWidgets.com] are the most popular.
Widgets on the desktop
Although by default widgets are confined to the Dashboard layer, a widget can be dragged from the widget bar to the desktop by simply releasing the F12 key whilst dragging and then releasing the key before dropping the widget. The widget will remain floating on the desktop until the next time Dashboard is activated.Furthermore, a command-line hack allows multiple Dashboard widgets to sit natively on the desktop in a more permanent fashion. This mode is enabled by issuing a configuration command on the command line, via the Terminal application:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YESOnce this option has been set, widgets dragged onto the desktop will remain floating on the desktop, even after log out or shutdown. To remove a widget from the desktop, and back to Dashboard, simply reverse the process and press the F12 key whilst dragging the widget to return it to the Dashboard layer.
Another option for widgets on the desktop is to use the shareware utility [Amnesty Widget Browser], a dashboard emulator that also allows the user to select which level (desktop, standard or floating) a widget occupies while it resides on the desktop.
References
- ["Desk Ornaments"] by Andy Hertzfeld, folklore.org, October, 1981, retrieved July 11, 2006
External links
- [Apple's Dashboard page]
- [Apple's Dashboard Developer page]
- [Apple's Dashboard video]
- Widget directories:
- * [Apple's Dashboard widget download page]
- * [Dashboardwidgets.com]
- * [Dashboard Exchange] Widget trading and exchange website (unaffiliated with Apple)
- * [WidgetDeveloper.com] Widget Resource for Developers and Users
- * [Dashboard Station] — developer information in Japanese and collection of widgets for Japanese people
- [The Dashboard ‘ripple’ effect in action]
- Wikipedia Widget
- [Amnesty Widget Browser] — also allows Dashboard widgets to run on Mac OS X Panther
- [Zack Russin], of KDE and Khtml announces partial compatibility with Dashboard widgets for the next version of KDE
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