Filed under: OS, Open Source, Widget Watch
KDE 4 will support Dashboard widgets
Now this is pretty
cool. KDE developer Zack Rusin notes on
this blog that the upcoming KDE 4 will be able to run Apple's Dashboard widgets. He writes:"I finally got most the implementation of the HTML Canvas element for KHTML finished...I'm planning to add full OSX Dashboard compatibility layer for Plasma (hence why I've spent most of the day yesterday on implementing the Canvas element)."
A pretty cool idea, though I wonder about widgets that depend on Applescripts. This will be fun to check out.
[Via AppleXNet]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
djones said 9:24AM on 1-06-2006
Any widgets that use Applescript or are built with Cocoa interactions via XCode will not be supported. This only eliminates widgets that are designed to interact with other programs on your computer, which, when you think about it, wouldn't matter on KDE anyway, since there's no Linux version of Apple applications. So this will be a non-issue with most widgets.
Linux applications that run as servers or have connectivity via tcp/ip will still be able to communicate with widgets the way many widgets do currently (Azureus widget comes to mind). So it won't be as if a key feature of the Dashboard layer will be removed; it will just rely on the keen and robust developers in the Linux community to make their own special-needs widgets for app connectivity.
Reply
Andrew Turner said 7:29AM on 1-09-2006
What about remote applescript ability? For example, a widget that interacts with a server application and displays the response?
This won't work natively. I have a widget that calls "on machine eppc://", which Linux wouldn't understand. However, it may be possible to open a socket/ssh tunnel to the server and pipe across "local" applescript commands to the Mac OS X machine, running the widget from a Linux machine.
Either that, or perhaps it would also be possible to wrap up the Applescript in Javascript via the OSA (http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/JavaScriptOSA/) and call it natively from Linux.
Reply