[Geowanking] the iPhone discussion

[Richard Fairhurst]

Anselm Hook <anselm at gmail.com> wrote:

> gee i wouldn't mind being able to write native apps...  video-game  
> like
> interfaces and the like... things where the interface performance is
> important...

The other thing I forgot to mention (curse my goldfish-like attention  
span) is Widgets. It's not yet clear whether "you can't install your  
own native apps" extends to Widgets. It may not.

Widgets are basically HTML/CSS/JavaScriptlets that appear in suitable  
eye-candy format on OS X's Dashboard. And, interestingly, you can  
hook into the Cocoa APIs with them. From Dave Hyatt's 'Surfin  
Safari'' blog:

> A Dashboard widget is a bundle that contains a principal HTML file  
> and any supporting code that the widget requires (be it CSS, JS,  
> images, or native code). A widget can add an optional interface to  
> native code, written in Objective-C, that can be bound into  
> JavaScript and made accessible from the HTML document's JS window  
> object.
Last year Apple released (inadvertently) an IDE for Widgets, called  
Dashcode (http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/dashboard.html). Why go  
to the trouble of putting together a whole IDE for a fairly marginal  
feature of OS X? Maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the  
iPhone...

cheers
Richard
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