All Articles Tagged Widgets

As part of the commentary on Jamie Zawinski leaving the Palm Pre for the iPhone (linked in the previous post), Daring Fireball adds:

Apple had a similar idea to WebOS for the iPhone, where certain apps would run as Dashboard-style widgets, written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Apple abandoned the idea in the six months between the iPhone’s January 2007 announcement and when it went on sale at the end of June, concluding that performance for such apps was unacceptable and that they should go native Cocoa across the board. And Apple was only going to do it for small apps, like Weather, Stocks, and Calculator, not the flagship apps like Calendar and Mail.

Of course, web technologies have improved since 2007, especially JavaScript rendering. Usability and performance complaints aside, Palm embracing web developers in order to incentivize adoption of their platform was a smart strategy. Still, it’s interesting to see Apple’s reaction to it back then, and their decision to go 100% native. (Especially considering they’re now being criticized for not having widgets).

Did Apple make the right choice, do we still want widgets on the iPhone, or is HTML5 and SQLite in Safari making them redundant?

SmartScreen provides widgets for your iPhone lock screen — provided you’re jailbroken, that it. The demo above shows calendar, stocks, and weather, but the developer will be making an SDK available so other apps can get in on the widgety goodness. Conceivably Twitter updates, IMs, to-dos — any information snippet really — could be added.

On behalf of non-Jailbreakers, Gizmodo asks Apple to bake this type of functionality into the official firmware, and let’s face it — they need something for iPhone 4.0 next year. Does it complicate Apple’s current, zen-like lock screen? Sure, but that lock screen is currently so informationally sparse, maybe it could use some complication?

If you try out SmartScreen, let us know what you think.

[Thanks angelrat101 for the tip!]

Sure, there are still plenty around — plenty of good ones even — but back before the App Store, before Apple released the iPhone SDK, WebApps were the development platform for the miraculous new mobile wireless platform.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) were the only tools needed, Steve Jobs told us, to make delightful, dynamic applications for the iPhone. And — by the way — every web developer already new how to use them! As a bonus of sorts, Apple provided some simple URL handles for things like telephone numbers, and some attributes and sample behaviors that helped optimize the iPhone experience.

For a while there was a torrent of WebApps, from re-purposed websites like FaceBook and Amazon, to original content and even games. Some were great, some were okay; it depended how well the idea suited the WebApp platform.

Now, 9 months post-iPhone SDK, 6 months post-App Store launch, post 15,000 apps, and we don’t hear much about WebApps anymore. Almost three months ago TiPb asked if WebApps had a future. Three months later, is the silence we’re hearing our best response?

Palm has now announced their new webOS platform, which is similar to WebApps but runs locally as well and should — though we don’t know the details yet — provide far greater hooks into the smartphone system (perhaps somewhere between WebApps and Native Apps, like Widgets). Could this kickstart the iPhone WebApp developers back into gear?

Anyone out there make, use, or find a killer iPhone WebApp lately? Know of any in the pipeline? And where do you think WebApps will be another 3 months? In another 6?

The iPhone Widget list keeps a close inventory on the growing list of iPhone web based applications in development. Worth a look.

ReadThanks to Chris Kerins for the tip