Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 11th Oct 2006 21:34 UTC
"A desktop full of handy widgets to tell you about what's going on in the world and what's going on around your computer. This is Jackfield. Jackfield is an application for the Gnome desktop that plays host to widgets; small applications to do the things you need. It can run widgets from Apple's Dashboard, will eventually be able to run those from Yahoo's Widget Engine, Microsoft's Gadget Sidebar, and Opera Widgets, and you can write your own."
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Member since:
2005-10-21
I have tried a few of Opera's widgets, but feel that widgets based off a browser are actually worthless. What good are they when I close my browser? In my humble opinion, here is how I feel widgets should work.
They should either be driven by the OS or a startup app. I don't get having widgets that are always on top and yet don't have a transparency setting. Widgets that are on top and take focus away from the app I am working in when I mouse over them are a bother to me. In my perfect widget world, there are three presentations for widgets.
One are the widgets I want to reside on the desktop. They can never be on top of other apps and are just a layer above the wallpaper. They are directly accessible by clicking on them with the mouse. They are either dockable or anchored to a desired spot.
My second presentation is the always on top layer. These widgets float above everything and each can have its transparency set always to 50% or more. They are also dockable or anchored. While they reside always on top, they never get focus from the mouse alone. To access them, you would have to mouse over them with a combination keystroke, something like CTRL-SHIFT/MouseOver. That would bring their opacity up to 100% and allow direct manipulation. This keeps these on top layer widgets always visible, but not interfering with my other apps, until I need to access them directly. Actually, I would like their transparency to gradually increase up to 90% the longer I mouse over them while working on a different app, until I move off them. That gets them out of the way while you are working and they come back when you move on.
Lastly, I can see having a widget interface that is built off of a task/tool bar. I don't see why Windows/Linux/OS X doesn't allow the user to create more than one task/tool bar. The user would specify which taskbar would house the "start" menu button and which would house tasks buttons. I like having my taskbar on the bottom of the screen, but I would like a toolbar up top where I could drop widgets that display their information wholly in the task/tool bar area only under normal situations but may drop down to provide more interface area when desired. What I envision for these task/tool bars are mini applets such as calculators and the like; Resource graphs such as CPU/Disk/Network activity graphs, Stock tickers, RSS Headline tickers, etc.
I would love to implement something like this, but I realized long ago that I was not God's gift to the programming world.