24 Hours of Leopard: Web Clips

Feature: Web Clips, little roll-your-own widgets for Dashboard that will tell you anything the Web can.

How it works: Making a Dashboard widget isn't really that hard now, but it's about to get a lot easier. There'll be a little button in Safari that you can press to take a "clip" of a web page and turn it into a widget on the Dashboard that updates as that page does. Found your local weather forecast somewhere, or a webcam that watches the outside of your house? Clip that section of the page into a web clip, and you've got a simple, custom-made widget so easy Grandma can make one. Here's what it looked like in an old build, and it's probably going to be even easier in Leopard.

Who will use it: If it's as easy as Apple says it is (and all indications say yes), everybody. Anything on the web can be clipped into a widget, so if you can access constantly updated content (say, the top story of TUAW?) then you could use it as a web clip.

You can check out all our 24 Hours of Leopard posts here.

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Feature: Web Clips, little roll-your-own widgets for Dashboard that will tell you anything the Web can.How it works: Making a Dashboard...

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Mr.Clicky

Mine keep disappearing on me...:-/

November 04 2007 at 6:28 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

simty

Anybody know where Web Clips are saved. I want to be able to share my Web Clips as files.

November 01 2007 at 5:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Simon Arch

@Olivier: I just tried it with my WordPress blog and I'm sorry to report that it did not work. The whole submission form was there, but the Publish button did not work.

October 26 2007 at 8:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Simon Arch

@Olivier: Hm. That's an interesting question. I GUESS if you made a webclip of the submission form... Hm. I'll check it out and let you know.

October 26 2007 at 8:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Olivier

Will webclip be able to POST to a website. I'd like to put my ziplist into a widget, and choose wich movie I return and have those changes updated onto the web.

October 26 2007 at 5:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Michael Clark

I wonder how intelligent these web clips will be. Do they check every minute? every 5 minutes? every hour? every day? every time Dashboard is opened? I can see a lot of new headaches coming down the road for popular sites being monitored by Web Clips.

Does anyone know what the user agent is for Web Clips?

October 26 2007 at 2:37 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Simon nailed it. Anyone who uses Dashboard. I still can't see much usefulness with Dashboard so Widgets are meaningless to me.

If I could display them on the desktop without something like Amnesty then I would love it though.

October 26 2007 at 11:08 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dan Kirshenbaum

This is an awesome feature in my opinion. It may seem trivial, but one example I have already used it for is in creating a birthday reminder widget. On facebook, I went to the main page and created a web clip of the upcoming birthdays section. It made the widget with no problem and it looks good.

October 26 2007 at 7:19 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Simon Arch

"If it's as easy as Apple says it is (and all indications say yes), everybody."

Well, I think it'd be more accurate to say "everybody who uses the Dashboard". Me, I'll take a pass on this feature, neat though it is.

October 26 2007 at 2:38 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jack

Now all someone needs to make is a tiny version of my Xbox Live friends list so I can clip a small box with the people online and what they are playing.

October 26 2007 at 2:33 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply