Zack Rusin of KDE has said KDE4 will have full support for widgets from OS X's Dashboard. "I finally got most the implementation of the HTML Canvas element for KHTML finished. It's in the kdelibs-js branch in SVN. After George/Maks merge their other changes we'll merge it to HEAD. I'm planning to add full OSX Dashboard compatibility layer for Plasma (hence why I've spent most of the day yesterday on implementing the Canvas element)."
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Member since:2005-10-19
Of course "Plasma" refers to quite a bit more than a Dashboard compatibility layer, but one of the initial bullet points was to provide an easy-to-use application platform for "widget class" software. Considering that Apple Dashboard is based on KDE KHTML technology (with certain enhancements that KDE is now adopting in turn), running Dashboard widget comes naturally in a way :-).
Gotta love the constructive forth-and-back that open source enables.
Edited 2006-01-01 18:04
Member since:2005-06-29
"I guess you won't have 100% compatibility with Apple Dashboard widgets, because some of them must call OS X only API's"
Well if the Apple API's for dashboard are documented so people can write the dashboard widgets it shouldn't be that hard to make compatible APIs for the KDE alternative.
Member since:
2006-01-01
So this is where http://plasma.kde.org/ is heading... very interesting. I guess you won't have 100% compatibility with Apple Dashboard widgets, because some of them must call OS X only API's. However, it will certainly make it easy to develop similar cool looking widgets for KDE.
I can't wait until I can try out some of this stuff