The Yahoo! Widgets blog has a very good, very balanced, and very detailed comparison on different widget technologies for Windows and Mac. They do mention Dashboard for the Mac, but I noticed they glossed over Dashcode for the Mac. I think it’s the most important invention in Widgetry since the widget was invented for one reason.

It allows people who aren’t coders (ie: You and I) to write widgets.

The problem with every widget technology is that while there may be a lot of different pre-made ones available on various web sites, they remain a complicate hodgepodge mess of development. People who’ve written Java in the past may have more luck, but even then the classes are usually non-standard (that allows for the integration with the OS that Java doesn’t have) and so on.

Dashcode is revolutionary because it doesn’t require you to write code. Period. You can if you want to, but considering most widgets fall into a few categories, you can just tweak the properties of an existing template and have a widget you want in minutes.

None of the other technologies offer that.

I think in the future if any of the technologies out there want wider spread adoption and use, they’ll have to get to the point where you and I can develop what we want. In that way, Apple was visionary. Yahoo! and Microsoft need to follow suit now.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, Yahoo!, Google, Dashboard

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 7:41 am and is filed under Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.