The latest version of Apple’s Mac operating system Leopard went on sale Friday, and aside from some reports of users getting blue screens of death, the release has been generally well received.
Desktop widgets have always been a love them or hate them proposition for many users, and yet it’s a strongly contested market, with Yahoo and Google offering desktop widget platforms that compete against native widget offerings in both OS X and Vista. The latest incarnation of OS X adds a new feature that widget fans will find useful: web widgets.
Web widgets allow you to create you own widget based on anything you see on a web page in Safari. It’s as simple as clicking on the web widget button, moving the box over the area you want, resizing, then clicking add for an instant desktop widget.
The widgets rely on finding suitable content to be used, but that’s not that hard. The Techmeme new item finder was my first choice for a web widget and it was as simple as I have described above; Drag the box over the new item finder box, then click add.
The only possible negative is that there is no obvious way of setting update/ refresh times for the widgets. Updates can be manually forced by clicking the “i” information button then clicking done; at least when I did this the widget updated. They may update at set intervals or by other methods, if you know how to set this let us know in the comments.
The Leopard web widgets service also allows for the importation of browser widgets, such as those offered by personalized desktop providers such as Netvibes and iGoogle. Amnesty Hypercube, a service we covered in August, provides a similar service.
This is one of my favorite new features to OSX. I have found web clip to be very useful.
grasping for content?
This is not news. Stick to startups
We cover widget providers extensively. This is news…even if I didn’t give a 500 word lecture as to how services like Amnesty Hypercube could be made redundant by this, and even some of the personalized desktop service providers will be challenged as well: after all, if I can create my own widgets and even steal theirs, why would I necessarily use their services?
A subset of Netvibes and iGoogle widgets will work in Dashboard. Netvibes and iGoogle are personalized homepage providers, not desktop providers as you mention above.
Netvibes UWA serves widgets as a stand-alone web page individually accessible from any browser, including the WebKit (Safari-light) powered Dashboard. Older Netvibes widgets, or inline widgets dependent on other on-page modules and functionality, will not work outside the Netvibes.com homepage.
Google Gadgets for Your Webpage are stand-alone web pages served by Google and will also work within the WebKit rendering engine. Inline gadgets or gadgets that have specified no syndicated distribution will not be available in stand-alone environments such as Dashboard.
Web Clips lets any Leopard user view any webpage inside a smaller viewing window and offset to the location of their choice.
I agree, this is not news, stick to startups. Stick to what your business promises. I say Techcrunch to the deadpool!
Widgets can also be refreshed by clicking on them (to select) and then refreshing with the key sequence ‘command’ and ‘r’.
The Webclip feature in Leopard is indeed novel and interesting, but it is limited to “clipping” live content from a live web page.
On the other hand, Hypercube is a true solution for users wishing to move Google Gadgets and other web widgets directly to the desktop, OS X Dashboard or Vista Sidebar. No live hosted page is required.
The public beta of Hypercube due later this year — with its integration with Facebook and other web services — will make this distinction even more clear.
The other thing to consider is what percentage of users will make their own widget given the opportunity to do so. My experience working on personalisable homepages for portals suggests that while everyone ticks “yes” when you ask them whether they want their own personalisable homepage, when the product goes live, most of those yes-tickers will never take the time to personalise their homepage. My observations suggest that ease-of-use has no bearing on that result - it doesn’t matter if it’s one button on the toolbar away.
Personalisation is like fast-food - knowing that the fast-food franchise lets you choose your own fillings gets you in the door rather than the competitor’s door. But 98% of us choose the off-the-shelf burger after we walk in and view the menu because it’s quicker, easier, and we figure whoever decided that pickles and ketchup go together must know what they’re doing. Mistakenly…
We think we want choice, but what we really want is the feeling that we could choose if we wanted to.
Just a gimick!
Gadgets are the real thing anyways!
I admit it, for a while there I was scared that Jobs was going to announce that their next candy-coated OSX (Leotard) would run on any PC hardware! My fears were abated when I heard him say this:
“Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends. …. But there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship. And we just can’t do it. We can’t ship junk,…. There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. And we think that there’s a very significant slice of the [market] that wants that too. … We don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products.”
THANK GOODNESS he still has a bad attitude like that and it sounds like he will never change! I hope he stays CEO of Apple forever.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I love the new OS and the web-widgets are awesome.
Fake Steve Ballmer
doesn’t Vista have desktop widgets?
Apple-R will refresh the widget, as well as any other widget.
“We cover widget providers extensively” - Why not feature some useful Firefox extensions like iMacros or (maybe) Coscripter, that are much more useful than 99% of all widgets?
I agree with alan we want more choice rather than a system that just emphasize on few features.
I have just bought a copy of Leopard and was very impressed with how easy the DashCode development environment is to use.
I set off right away to create a widget (just for kicks) and decided to leverage Covestor’s data export APIs. worked like a charm and took me only a few hours. The interface design part is just magic!
The widget is available here: http://stephsthoughts.brainage.org/?p=150
Webwag launched the Wod, beginning of this year. The wod allows every user (with a web browser) to do this: http://blog.webwag.com/?p=24. We recently launched also a Firefox plugin to even simplify this process ( http://blog.landspurg.net/widg.....ade-magic/ )
Can these be plugged into iweb though… that would be great!
What’s this about: “It’s as simple as clicking on the web widget button” What web widget button? Excuse me for being so naive. Thanks.
http://www.games2web.com/forum.....hp?p=21029