The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I've spent the morning thumbing through SpiderWorks' OS X Technology Guide to Dashboard by Danny Goodman, released this week. I've always found Goodman's books useful, and this is no exception. He strikes that balance between "If this is telling you anything new, you probably shouldn't have a computer in the first place" and "If I wanted to read the whitepapers, I would have downloaded the whitepapers; they're free." I don't know if I'll be running out to the store to pick up the paper copy any time soon, but for less than $15, the PDF seems like money well spent if I ever diecide to write a widget. Goodman Walks through Widget design from start to finish, and brings his formidable AppleScript, DHTML and JavaScript experience to bear with some insights into UI design and web services interfaces, as well as tips on using Widgets as hooks to AppleScripts and shell scripts. Seen this way, Widgets become particularly useful for people who want to provide some basic GUI functionality for small scripts without worrying about heavy-duty Cocoa and Obj-C binding for Perl, Python, Ruby, etc., as well as people who just want to keep tabs on their eBay auctions.