| Dashboard (software) |
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Information AboutDashboard (software) |
Dashboard is an application for Apple Computer 's Mac OS X operating system, 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), and is only available for users running version 10.4 (or higher). When Dashboard is activated, the user's desktop is dimmed and widgets fade into the foreground. Like application windows, they can be moved around and arranged in different ways, but cannot be removed from the layer without the use of a command line hack (see below). 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:
Once all of these files are in the root of a directory, it is given a name and the extension ".wdgt", and then it can be opened up in Dashboard as a widget. More complex widgets may also include a Cocoa widget plugin (for platform-specific functionality), one or more JavaScript files (for text scrolling, preferences, etc.) or multiple images (for personalized select menus or buttons). 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 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 to 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, supporters of Dashboard argue that it is based on Apple’s Desk Accessories , first released in 1984 with the original Macintosh . 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 and JavaScript. INCLUDED WIDGETS At first, Apple included 14 widgets with Mac OS X 10.4 - 10.4.3. They consisted of:
After the Macworld 2006 keynote, however, Steve Jobs also announced four new widgets (Ski Report, People Finder, Google Search, and ESPN), as well as significant updates to the Phone Book and Calendar widgets. All of these are available through the Mac OS X 10.4.4 update. 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. |
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