Surfin' Safari

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I've seen plenty of opinions on what Dashboard is, most from people who haven't even used it yet. :)

Just to prove a point that there are many ways to think about this new feature, here's another take on what Dashboard is. From a browser geek's perspective, the Dashboard is a collection of HTML sidebar panels liberated from the browser window and placed anywhere on your screen. The "Web pages as widgets" concept is really just a logical extension of the Web sidebar panel metaphor fused with Expose.

In a Web browser like Mozilla, for example, the sidebar can be toggled with a key, the panels inside can be viewed, and individual panels can be selected, reordered, managed, and added/deleted. Custom panels can be installed into the sidebar and people have written panels for Mozilla (and Opera) that do everything from FedEx package tracking to HTML validation.

In other words, like the desk accessories of yore, the sidebar panels in Web browsers are web page accessories that perform basic functions. When Netscape 6 came out many of these panels were downloadable from netscape.com. People wrote Bugzilla widgets for checking Mozilla bugs, thesaurus and dictionary widgets, widgets for using lxr, FedEx package trackers, and so on. There were a lot of these panels made, written both in XUL and in HTML, and this was done a long time ago... which brings me to my point.

The concept of small "Web pages as accessories" inside a browser has existed for years.

However the sidebar metaphor suffers from usability problems, such as the inability to scale up to many panels as well as being constrained by the browser's window width. It's also hard to view multiple panels at once. The panels are also tied to a particular application (the browser) despite frequently having no connection to the application itself.

A logical way of solving these sidebar panel usability problems is to free those panels from the browser window and make them accessible anywhere on the screen (both invokable and dismissable with the touch of a key). This gives you the real estate you need to really make the widgets useful, lets you show multiple widgets at once, and makes the UI for panel configuration easier, since you have more room to represent that user interface on-screen.

I haven't blogged in a long time, primarily because I've been so busy preparing for WWDC (working frantically on my presentation as well as fixes to WebCore to support Safari RSS and Dashboard of course). I'll be talking about both Dashboard and Safari RSS a lot more in depth (primarily from the perspective of all the new open source WebCore features that were added to support these two new features) once I've gotten some sleep. :)

I wanted to blog briefly to clear up what the widgets actually are written in. They are Web pages, plain and simple (with extra features thrown in for added measure). Apple's own web site says "build your own widgets using the JavaScript language", but that's sort of misleading. The widgets are HTML+CSS+JS. They are not some JS-only thing.

In other words, each widget is just a web page, and so you have the full power of WebKit behind each one... CSS2, DOM2, JS, HTML, XMLHttpRequest, Flash, Quicktime, Java, etc. I'll have a lot more to say later on, but I thought it important to clear that up right up front, since a lot of people were asking me about it in email and such.

Just to clear up a common misconception, iTunes does not use WebKit to render the music store. What you see when you visit the iTunes music store may look "web-like", but it isn't HTML, and it isn't rendered by WebKit.