Widgets, modules and the future of modular design
Jason Kotke writes….
Interesting note on Dave Hyatt’s site about Dashboard and the version of Safari that will ship with Tiger (Hyatt is the lead developer on Safari): [The Dashboard widgets] are Web pages, plain and simple (with extra features thrown in for added measure). Apple’s own web site says “build your own widgets using the JavaScript language”, but that’s sort of misleading. The widgets are HTML+CSS+JS. They are not some JS-only thing….
OK - so controversy aside about ripping off Konfabulator - Apple’s Dashboard brings to light some really interesting notions of pluggable modules. It’s an idea who’s time has come.
That’s always what I wanted Macromedia’s product line to look like. If you can imagine a word processor, speadsheet and contact list all working together - from different vendors - yes - that’s what Longhorn will enable.
Microsoft has (for years) been evolving and grokking how this should work. Outlook now uses the Word text editor. Spell checking, browsing and messaging are ubiquitous OS features.
But they gotta open it up for us all to use. That’s what was wrong with OLE.
I hate to say this - but I predict that within one year they’ll be open standards for interconnecting modules together - sort of inter-module APIs - to flow micro-content, communication and ‘activity based’ computing.
But generalizing a combination of tasks and interaction as “activities” - we’ll be able to reduce everything to APIs and schemas. This is ONE of teh big innovations perculating up from the blogosphere, DLAs (digital lfiestyle aggregators) and open source movement.
But