OK - I’ve now had time to cool down, read all the rebutts and opinions and I even spammed by friends list with a “Boycott Apple” plea.

So now we can get some perspective on all this.

Dashboard appears to be little HTML panes - which indeed should enable anyone to add anything they like. It kind of reminds me of the Blogrolling Commons distribution idea - I gave to Jason DeFillippo last year.

This is what drew me to help Laszlo and their BlogBox objects and recently the Tribe Cast objects.

So believe me - I live, breath and sleep toolbars, add-ins, bookmarklets and any sort of anything that’s open and can be used for enabling software to get used anywhere.

Certainly this is where the mobile services world is going too - becoming an extension of our PC lives.

Alf Eaton brings up a obvious point:

I guess the widgets won’t be able to load the actual code in from outside, unlike Macromedia Central or Laszlo widgets - so maybe there could be a separate kind of floaty widget that could load in code pages (rather than just data) from the net but wouldn’t be able to access the system.

Without being able to “API Into” a system, these little HTML pages are nothing more than just - well HTML pages.

But just imagine if we had open APIs to inter-connect modules together!

Man oh man I’m getting excited, I’d better call David Temkin and Sarah Allen. Oliver Steele too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2004 at 11:33 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.