them, I m now convinced that this new way of getting web information is the future. It s really 

the next step beyond Sherlock, and in some ways is just an extension of RSS and an easy way of 

leveraging web services on your desktop. If I needed any confirmation for my gut feeling on this, 

Yahoo provided it this week by gobbling up Konfabulator (before Microsoft could get to them, 

I m sure)! (More on that later...) 

Building this widget also took me back by confirming what I had read about Dashboard widgets 

 namely, they are really just little web pages that use transparency and run outside of a web 

browser. They can do more than web pages can do if you get fancy with them, and Apple has 

added some spectacular animations to Dashboard to make them look cooler than anything a 

browser can do, but... bottom line... if you know HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and graphics, you can 

build a Dashboard widget! 

Of course, to get started, I found a couple of good widgets to crib from. : ) Heck, that s how I 

learned HTML and JavaScript in the first place! One of the reasons the web took off like it did is 

that the underlying code for web pages is totally transparent. All you have to do is "show 

source", and there s the code for you to study. Creative types who like simple programming 

(Gee, isn t that what a Mac user is?) were 

delighted with what they could do as web 

page design matured, and they ll be 

similarly delighted with the widget model. 

With widgets, you have to know how to 

look inside Mac OS X "packages," but 

that s easy enough to do. Right click (Ctrl 

click) on a widget in the Finder, and select 

"Show package contents." Once inside the 

Contents folder, you ll see that there are 

just a few little files  an HTML page, one 

or more JavaScript files, a Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file, some graphics, and some widget 

required .plist (property list XML) files. 

  MPN, LLC 2005 macCompanion 

Page 12 

August 2005, Volume 3 Issue 8