The Incrementalist

When people install a new operating system, one of the first things they do is go poking around to see what’s different. With Tiger, one of the first things that they’re going to notice is Dashboard.

Pedigree

While Dashboard was immediately compared to Konfabulator because of its visual, technical, and “widget” naming similarities, it also owes much to Apple’s old Desk Accessories, as John Gruber and others have pointed out. I think of them as a new version of the old Terminate and Stay Resident programs popular on MS-DOS. Generally, those programs didn’t live on the same screen as the main program you were using. Instead, they popped up when you pressed a keyboard combination. Apple’s design decision to put Dashboard widgets on a separate “layer” that you can call up makes them much more useful to me than Konfabulator, because there truly is never enough screen real estate, and the Konfabulator widgets immediately got smothered under other windows when I tried to use them. (I should note that it’s also possible to keep Dashboard widgets on your desktop.)

Development Simplicity

Apple’s decision to make HTML/CSS/Javascript the lingua franca is Dashboard’s most interesting feature to me. Konfabulator’s XML/Javascript environment came close, but Apple’s “lazy” decision to use their Safari WebKit engine means that many widgets can actually be developed and viewed in a browser. (Many of the early posters on the Dashboard Widgets site were clearly developing their widgets without any access to Tiger.)

Using standard technologies means that their developer population is the large set of people who already know how to develop using web standards. Furthermore, given the recent buzz around “Ajax” web applications, Dashboard gives people like me another excuse teach myself data-driven Javascript programming.

By effectively turning Ajax into a GUI library for desktop apps, Dashboard almost fulfills the plan that Netscape appeared to be working towards in the late 1990s. While many widgets will be little more than borderless self-refreshing web pages, it’s also possible to hook up a Dashboard interface to native code. In Apple’s first Dashboard widget contest at WWDC 2004, the top prize went to a widget which put an HTML face on the GNU Go game engine.

Constency

Dashboard isn’t all roses though. For one, going to HTML-based interfaces makes it even easier for Apple to continue their recent trend of ignoring their own interface conventions whenever it suits their fancy. (See brushed metal vs. aqua, the woodgrain GarageBand window, the non-standard sets of widgets in the new iPhoto.) In several of the sample widgets that ship with Dashboard, they go to great lengths in Javascript to create properly-behaving milky-white scroll bars rather than simply using the standard ones:

Even so, the initial set of widgets that Apple shares largely consistent features: the aforementioned white scroll bars, a circled i which fades in to trigger a flip to the preferences side, rounded square widget icons, and a dark textured flip side with a large “Done” button. It’ll be interesting to which, if any, of these features get adopted by the third-party widget community.

What is it good for?

In the initial burst of activity following Tiger’s release, there’s a lot of experimentation going on in the Dashboard world. The best place to watch this happen is the Dashboard Widgets Showcase, which seems to have captured the, uh, Tiger’s share of widget-writing activity. From what I’ve seen so far, widgets generally fall into the following categories (from most to least useful):

• Status Displays — These display some piece of information which changes relatively frequently, and which you want to see at a moment’s notice. Examples include Apple’s weather and stock displays, the iTunes Connection Monitor, and my Bloglines Notifier.
• Handy Controls — These are small bits of functionality that people want to have ready access to–good examples here are Apple’s iTunes widget, Panic’s Transmit FTP widget, and the Capture screenshot tool.
• Games and Geegaws — Games and toys like miniPatience, Hula Girl, and MAYA Cards. These don’t necessarily benefit from being on Dashboard, other than not crowding up your desktop, and being quickly dismissable when your boss walks by.

Baby Steps

As first experiments with Dashboard, I’ve put together a few widgets of my own. The first is Bloglines Notifier, featuring a gorgeous visual design by Jeremy Koempel:

It’s very simple, showing you the unread posts in your Bloglines online RSS reader account, and giving you a button to go read them. The other is a little promotional widget that I cooked up with some of my co-workers at MAYA Design:

This one’s a virtual version of our customized playing cards that we give out as promo schwag. Each one features a different pithy design quote which reflects our design philosophy. This one came about when I realized that Dashboard’s flipping functionality would be a good match for playing cards.

I’ve got a couple others in the works, so keep watching this space…