widgets widgets widgets

Thursday May 26th 2005 06:26 AM PST

Just as i got home last night, Eric asked me if i knew any place that explained building widgets for Dashboard. Almost as he had asked me the question, he responded with "found it" and sent me the link to Apple's Dev Connection Url. So me being curious, and having 10 minutes to fuck around, i started to take a look. My jaw dropped as i see the section, "What's in a Widget?" WTF!!! It's just HTML!!!!?? I new these things were EASY to build, but i didn't know they were that fuckin easy. So 2 minutes later i've already built a test "hello world" widget, and i'm pulling apart code on all the widgets i've already got installed. Then i get to the section about internet Plug-ins. So you're saying that i could actually build a widget with nothing but flash if i really wanted to? Hehehehehehe. I'm really going to be dangerous now.

Comments:

so now after a little research i feel like a child. Everywhere i go it seems that people are telling me that i'm stupid because i want to use flash in a widget. They say there are memory issues, there are speed and CPU issues, but nobody will tell me how to do it. The general html object and embed tags won't work as usual, but i've yet to find documentation on the way to actually make flash work in the widget. I wish people would stop warning me about the dangers of Flash. I already fuckin know how dangerous this shit is. I can bring HUGE cpu's to their knees. And that's just in an ad banner. :) I want to build my own widgets, not for distribution. I want to see how bad the CPU hit is. I want to experiment with the shit. Why is everybody telling me how bad an idea it is, and not telling me how to do it.

Posted by:

Dave, you shouldn't build a widget out of Flash. I dunno if you're aware of it, but there's gonna be a lot of problems with memory and CPU cycles and speed and whatnot. It's just not a good idea.

I just wanted to join in with the chorus of voices that's telling you not to do it, sorry :-)

Posted by: Yams