iPhone to gain Spotlight and true widget support?

Like so many others armed with iFuntastic's new iPhone file browser, Jimmie Geddes at iPhoneology has been going iPhone-spelunking. Apparently, Geddes has made some interesting discoveries in the form of images buried in the file system that have suggestive names. First is widget.png, found in: / System / Library / CoresServices / SpringBoard.app/. SpringBoard is the app that actually powers the iPhone's home screen and displays all those pretty little square icons, suggesting that this generic widget icon could be used for widgets that don't provide their own (hint hint, future iPhone widget developers).

Next up are pictures named spotlight-full.png and spotlight-keyboard.png, the former pictured in this post. Again, I agree with Geddes that these are very suggestive of Spotlight being included in a future iPhone update. With all the push Apple made with the search paradigm by releasing Spotlight in Tiger in 2005, I'm pretty surprised the iPhone lacks any kind of a search function, let alone at least the abilities to search certain things like contacts that other phones have been able to do for years.

As usual, there is no official word on these features or if they'll actually be coming at all. Here's hoping these images weren't simply left there by an engineer playing around with what could be, instead of what will be.

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Source: http://www.iphoneology.com/2007/08/08/widgets-spotlight-comi…

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Like so many others armed with iFuntastic's new iPhone file browser, Jimmie Geddes at iPhoneology has been going iPhone-spelunking....

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larry Friedman

What could possibly sum this up....

Duuuuuhhhhhhh

I can't believe that everyone is doubting Widgets from Apple or others. There used to be 15, now there are 16. Space for four more on the screen. Cmon people, why is this so hard?

August 09 2007 at 4:56 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jon

I think #4 is onto something. This is something I have suspected for a while. I don't think Apple would release the SDK separately from Xcode, and we know a major Xcode update is coming in October. This may also explain why Leopard was pushed back to October.

August 09 2007 at 3:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Timmay

Springboard eh? Reminds me of my old Handspring Visor Pro...

August 09 2007 at 2:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Alex

As has already been mentioned, this is the image used to fade out the contents of the screen whenever a dialog pops up.

August 09 2007 at 2:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Danny

Nice find. IMHO the proof for "widgets on the iPhone" has been staring everyone in the face: Dashcode. Why would Apple wait 2+ years to release an IDE for widgets if deployment were limited to Dashboard? After all, thousands of widgets have been written for Dashboard by third-parties without it.

A free visually-oriented IDE (Dashcode) enforces the use of standards in development (e.g. using Apple's JS classes). And standards are the key for closed-system (iPhone) deployment for the IDE's creations (widgets).

August 09 2007 at 2:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jersey

The image in the post is used in places throughout the interface, e.g. when you are asked if you want to join a particular wireless network that hasn't been used before. Not so sure it indicates future spotlight capabilities --- now if it were an image of the blue spotlight magnifying glass, that would be different.

August 09 2007 at 2:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

ars_workerbee

uh, thats the image used to "spotlight" messages that pop up, like a recieved text message indicator. nice try, but i think they were being a little more literal in the naming of it.

August 09 2007 at 2:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Sebastiaan de With

Quite exciting - and I wouldn't say such resources exist on accident. Who knows what we'll see in the future?

August 09 2007 at 1:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply