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ARTICLES IN THE BOOK

  1. Architecture of Windows NT
  2. AutoPlay
  3. Bill Gates
  4. BitLocker Drive Encryption
  5. Calibri
  6. Cambria
  7. Candara
  8. Chess Titans
  9. ClearType
  10. Consolas
  11. Constantia
  12. Control Panel
  13. Corbel
  14. Criticism of Windows Vista
  15. Dashboard
  16. Desktop Window Manager
  17. Development of Windows Vista
  18. Digital locker
  19. Digital rights management
  20. Extensible Application Markup Language
  21. Features new to Windows Vista
  22. Graphical user interface
  23. Group Shot
  24. ImageX
  25. INI file
  26. Internet Explorer
  27. Internet Information Services
  28. Kernel Transaction Manager
  29. List of Microsoft software codenames
  30. List of Microsoft Windows components
  31. List of WPF applications
  32. Luna
  33. Mahjong Titans
  34. Meiryo
  35. Microsoft Assistance Markup Language
  36. Microsoft Expression Blend
  37. Microsoft Expression Design
  38. Microsoft Gadgets
  39. Microsoft Software Assurance
  40. Microsoft Virtual PC
  41. Microsoft Visual Studio
  42. Microsoft Windows
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  44. MS-DOS
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  47. Object manager
  48. Operating system
  49. Original Equipment Manufacturer
  50. Outlook Express
  51. Peer Name Resolution Protocol
  52. Protected Video Path
  53. Purble Place
  54. ReadyBoost
  55. Recovery Console
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  57. Security and safety features of Windows Vista
  58. Segoe UI
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  60. WIM image format
  61. Windows Aero
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  84. Windows Presentation Foundation
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  88. Windows Server Longhorn
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  90. Windows SharePoint Services
  91. Windows Shell
  92. Windows Sidebar
  93. Windows SideShow
  94. Windows System Assessment Tool
  95. Windows System Recovery
  96. Windows Update
  97. Windows Vienna
  98. Windows Vista
  99. Windows Vista editions and pricing
  100. Windows Vista Startup Process
  101. Windows Workflow Foundation
  102. Windows XP
  103. Windows XP Media Center Edition
  104. XML Paper Specification
  105. Yahoo Widget Engine
 



A GUIDE TO WINDOWS VISTA
This article is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_%28software%29

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License 

Dashboard (software)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Dashboard is an application for Apple's Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger operating system, used for hosting mini-applications known as widgets. It is a semi-transparent layer that is invisible to the user unless activated by a hotkey, which can be set to the user's preference. Microsoft's Gadgets and the Windows Sidebar are similar.

When Dashboard is activated, the user's desktop is dimmed and widgets fade into the foreground. Like application windows, they can be moved around, rearranged, deleted, and recreated (so that more than one of the same Widget is open at the same time, possibly with different settings). New widgets can be opened, via a menu bar, by dragging their icon out into the layer. After loading, the widget is ready for use.

Creation of widgets

Dashboard widget icon
Dashboard widget icon

Dashboard widgets are created using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. Because the same programming languages are used for creating websites, many web developers can already build them. Widgets themselves are, at the core, simply HTML files that are displayed within the Dashboard layer; they use the WebKit application framework that is also used in Apple's Safari web browser, meaning even users running earlier versions of Mac OS X- where Dashboard is unavailable- can build them.

When a Dashboard widget is built, it usually consists of six files:

  • The widget's HTML file, which is the actual file that will be displayed in the Dashboard layer
  • The widget's CSS file, which is used for styling the widget (but is called on from the HTML file)
  • The widget's JavaScript file, although it may be implemented directly within the HTML file if the developer desires
  • The widget's Property List (called “Info.plist”), which is what Dashboard uses to load the widget’s properties (i.e.: name, version, HTML file, etc.)
  • The background image of the widget, in PNG format
  • The icon that is displayed in the menu bar

Once all of these files are in the root of a directory, it is given a name and the extension ".wdgt", and then it can be opened up in Dashboard as a widget. More complex widgets may also include a Cocoa widget plugin (for platform-specific functionality), one or more JavaScript files (for text scrolling, preferences, etc.) or multiple images (for personalized select menus or buttons).

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple's next operating system, will include an application called Dashcode, which is a more user-friendly way of creating widgets.

Widget functions and capabilities

Dashboard widgets, like web pages, are capable of many different things, oftentimes to perform tasks that would be tedious or complicated for the user to access manually. One example is the Google Search widget, which simply opens up the user's browser and performs a Google search. Other widgets, like Wikipedia, grab the contents of webpages and display them within Dashboard. Some widgets can also serve as games, using Adobe Flash (or another multimedia authoring program) to create games just as if they were in a browser.

Graphics

With the click of the mouse or the press of a hotkey, the Dashboard is activated and the Widgets "fly" onscreen. They disappear in a similar way.
With the click of the mouse or the press of a hotkey, the Dashboard is activated and the Widgets "fly" onscreen. They disappear in a similar way.

Dashboard uses a variety of graphical effects for displaying, opening, and using widgets. For instance, a 3-D flip effect is used to simulate the widget flipping around (where a user may change the preferences); other effects include cross-fades from icon to body (when opening widgets), or a suck-in effect when they are closed. On sufficiently powered Macs, widgets will produce a ripple effect when they are opened, like a leaf falling onto water. Some users believe that these effects are taxing and superfluous, consuming CPU resources, but with the help of OS X’s Quartz Extreme and Core Image graphics architectures, sufficient computing power to render them in real time is available.

Dashboard vs. Konfabulator

Dashboard has been widely compared to Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widget Engine) and sometimes called a copy of it, due to the similarities between their graphical aspects and the fact that they both use the term “widgets” to describe the objects in their environments. Konfabulator may in turn have been based on Apple’s Desk Accessories [1], first released in 1984 with the original Macintosh. Desk Accessories, similar to widgets, were small mini-applications that operated on a user’s desktop. After the introduction of System 7 and cooperative multitasking the necessity of creating Desk Accessories was removed and developers were encouraged to create applications instead. The OS continued to support them, for backward compatability, until the switch to Mac OS X (In fact, the Calculator desk accessory remained in the Mac OS up until OS 9, 17 years without an update).

The code bases for Konfabulator and Dashboard are also different: whereas Konfabulator uses XML and JavaScript to generate Widgets, Dashboard uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Objective C.

Included widgets

At first, Apple included 14 widgets with Mac OS X 10.4 - 10.4.3. They consisted of:

  • Address Book
  • Calculator
  • Calendar
  • Dictionary
  • Flight Tracker
  • iTunes Controller
  • Phone Book
  • Stickies
  • Stocks
  • Tile Game
  • Translation
  • Unit Converter
  • Weather
  • World Clock

After the Macworld 2006 keynote, however, Steve Jobs also announced four new widgets (Ski Report, People Finder, Google Search, and ESPN), as well as significant updates to the Phone Book and Calendar widgets. All of these are available through the Mac OS X 10.4.4 update.

In addition, the upcoming version of Apple's operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will include new widgets. One of these is WebClip, which will allow any user to turn a rectangular section of any webpage into a widget. The widget updates as the website does, and all links and other interactive material in the widget's selection of the webpage works as if the website is being accessed from Safari.

Apple also highly encourages developers to build their own widgets; many Dashboard-related sites provide downloads to collections of different widgets. Currently, Apple’s own Dashboard page and DashboardWidgets.com are the most popular. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will also include Dashcode, an application for the easy creation of widgets.

Images from included widgets

Widgets on the desktop

Although by default widgets are confined to the Dashboard layer, a widget can be dragged from the widget bar to the desktop by simply selecting the widget, dragging it, and then switching back to the Desktop, from the Dashboard, before dropping the widget. (The user can switch between the Dashboard and the Desktop by pressing F12 on the keyboard.) The widget will remain floating on the desktop until the next time the Dashboard is opened.

To keep one or more widgets on the desktop in a more permanent fashion, the Dashboard "devmode" must be activated. Enter the following into the Terminal, or Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app):

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

and then restart the Dock (and Dashboard):

killall Dock

Once this option has been set, widgets dragged from the Dashboard will remain floating on the desktop, even after log out or shutdown. To move a desktop widget back to the Dashboard, simply reverse the process used to move it onto the desktop.

Another option for widgets on the desktop is to use the shareware utility Amnesty Widget Browser, a dashboard emulator that also allows the user to select which level (desktop, standard or floating) a widget occupies while it resides on the desktop.

See also

  • Comparison of widget engines

Similar Software

  • adesklets (X11)
  • Amazing Brass
  • AveDesk Small and memory efficient widgets engine for windows
  • DesktopX (Windows)
  • dotWidget Free and opensource widgets engine done in VB6
  • gDesklets (GNOME)
  • Google Desktop
  • Kapsules Widget engine done in C#
  • Litestep Freeform GUI for Microsoft Windows
  • Microsoft gadgets
  • Samurize
  • SuperKaramba (KDE)
  • Windows Sidebar
  • Yahoo! Widget Engine Windows and Macintosh compatible widgets engine.(formally known as Konfabulator) List of Yahoo! Widget Engine widgets

References

  • "Desk Ornaments" by Andy Hertzfeld, folklore.org, October, 1981, retrieved July 11, 2006

External links

  • Apple's Dashboard page
  • Apple's Dashboard Developer page
  • Apple's Dashboard video
  • Apple's Dashboard widget download page
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_%28software%29"