Filed under: iPhone
The iPhone and vestigial Widgets
Yesterday, I posted about Widget.app, a utility to run OS X widgets on your iPhone. Widgets and the iPhone share a closer relationship than that post suggests. When you create a folder at the root of your tree called /Widgets and populate it, the widgets actually show up in Springboard--the iPhone home screen. When you tap widgets, the iPhone attempts (and fails) to run /System/Library/CoreServices/Dashboard.app. This application does not actually exist or, at least, did not ship with the iPhone. It's clear that Apple designed expandable Widget support for iPhone but cut it out at some stage of the design/delivery process.
Thanks to BloomFilter
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Johnny said 11:57AM on 9-18-2007
Interesting.... I had thought before we all found out there would be no support for third party apps, that they would be based mostly on widgets. I'm sure the missing Dashboard.app is resting somewhere on a drive in Cupertino just waiting to get onto our iPhones... some day.
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Sidep said 12:17PM on 9-18-2007
not exactly, what do we know ships with leopard? anyone? anyone? Bueller? well it happens to be a widget development kit like none other... i will venture to guess that third party support will come shortly after leopard
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L. Gordon said 12:20PM on 9-18-2007
How is it "clear that Apple designed expandable Widget support for iPhone but cut it out at some stage of the design/delivery process" ? If they're just slimming down OS X to fit on the phone, wouldn't it be a good chance that they left some things in by accident?
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Erica Sadun said 12:21PM on 9-18-2007
LGordon: That's not how they do widgets and dashboard on OS X.
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sam beckham said 12:26PM on 9-18-2007
i found this app that let's you download 100's of different apps-- it's very simple.
it's clear apple wants developers to expand and optimize the iphone.
there's a video tutorial that breaks it down here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yETCLqtSVCg
let me know how it works out.
i have been unable to stop playing tap tap revolution for days. :)
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Radu Dutzan said 12:30PM on 9-18-2007
Gordon, actually, I dont' think that's the case. If you know just a bit abput the internals of OS X, you should know that Widgets run in Dock.app, and that the Dashboard.app that sits in the Applications folder is just a trigger that interacts with Dock.
So they must have taken code from Dock to develop a stand-alone Widget interpreter. Then yes, they probably had Widget support in mind while developing the iPhone, but cut it out for some reason.
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difelicem said 1:12PM on 9-18-2007
The thing is, the iPhone already supports Widgets. One look at the Weather and Stock Quote "Widget" tells us that. We need to find out what library they use, If any.
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Libby said 3:09PM on 9-18-2007
#7: no, this is a common misconception because Weather and Stock Quote look like their widget counterparts on Tiger. On the iPhone, these are apps (.app). As Erica notes, the iPhone has no native widget support (yet?).
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L. Gordon said 4:25PM on 9-18-2007
Ah, I didn't realize the widgets ran in Dock.app. I use 10.3 and haven't played around with 10.4, so was speculating.
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R.Yaker said 11:02PM on 9-19-2007
Can someone package some widgets for installer.app?
SOmeone already took care of the libraries and widget.app.
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