Dashboard Widgets
The forthcoming version of Mac OS X—codednamed Tiger—will have support a new GUI feature called Dashboard. This article from Apple explains it like so:
Widgets are perfect for working with small amounts of data or interacting with other applications, both on your desktop and across the web. And they provide an excellent way to add functionality to an existing application. This means there are many opportunities for developers, whether creating new products, or adding market-differentiating value to an existing one.
The other clever aspect is the technology: HTML, CSS, Javascript. I wonder if bibliographic applications would a good candidate for a Widget? Perhaps a little window that queries a database via SRU/CQL, and allows one to insert citations into applications?
That does sound like a good idea. If you could drag some citation data (or a link) from a browser window into a Widget, which would then store that data in a database and present a list of citations, which could then be dragged into a word processor, that could work nicely.
Hi Alf: So how much of this can one do with Javascript and HTTP? The eXist XML DB has a decent MODS demo, and a REST interface that’s easy to work with (SRU/CQL support likely to come in the future). That might be a really quick and easy way to demo functionality. If it works, then it’d be easy to move to a Dashboard Widget.
BTW, the SRU/CQL angle would mean the Widget would communicate with a local DB with the same interface as with a remote one (like the Library of Congress). Could work nicely in this context.
I think the Javascript security will make this difficult (at the moment - I don’t know how Dashboard will handle different security layers), as you couldn’t drag things from one window (or even frame) to another. I don’t know whether Widgets will be able to communicate with other applications either (eg by running Applescript) - that could be dangerous as well.