Just after launching the TechEd Schedule Widget for TechEd '06 in Las Vegas, I ran into john.astill/blog, a regular in the SDN blogger community and a fellow Mac user. He gave me hell for not publishing a native Dashboard version of the widget. Truth be told, I wasn’t even sure the one we made would run on Mac in the first place using the OS X version of Yahoo!’s widget engine (it did).The next day I ran into John in the SDN Clubhouse and he said “Hey Eric! I finished a native Mac version of the TechEd schedule widget running on Dashboard!” How cool is that? Now before all you non-Mac users say “what a waste of time, it already ran on Mac!” I’d like to bring up my biggest gripe about the Yahoo!’s widget engine: you can’t easily hide it and bring it back. That means my cool 520x240 pixel widget will constantly take up space unless I glue it to the desktop, necessitating me to close all my windows to briefly use a widget. With Apple’s dashboard, you can set-up a hot corner on your screen and just drag your mouse over to it and voila! You have widgets.
Anyway, kudos to John Astill.
TechEd 06 Las Vegas Schedule OS X Widget.
A case for Enterprise Widgets
