Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

The Dashboard widgets in Mac OS X 10.4 are web pages -- Comment()
How Apple implemented Dashboard: "I wanted to blog briefly to clear up what the widgets actually are written in. They are Web pages, plain and simple (with extra features thrown in for added measure). Apple's own web site says "build your own widgets using the JavaScript language", but that's sort of misleading. The widgets are HTML+CSS+JS. They are not some JS-only thing. [...] In other words, each widget is just a web page, and so you have the full power of WebKit behind each one... CSS2, DOM2, JS, HTML, XMLHttpRequest, Flash, Quicktime, Java, etc." [Surfin' Safari]

Digital camera reviews on the net -- Comment()
A colleague is planning to buy a (first) digital camera, so I made a list of the best sites on product information:

Also, there is an excellent Finnish news source at Digicamera.net.

-- Comment()
Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics Award: "Apple has found five of the most important, innovative and visionary scientific research projects in the U.S. and is awarding them the powerful computational tools they need to expand the horizons of their exciting research." [Apple Hot News]

Controversy about Konfabulator vs. Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' -- Comment()
The developers of Konfabulator accuse Apple of copying the functionality into the next release of Mac OS X (10.4, aka 'Tiger'). However, one should note that Apple originally invented the concept of desk accessory, which were prominent in early (non-multitasking) versions of Mac OS. Later desk accessories were mostly replaced with separate applications. Now, it seems that desk accessories will make a comeback. So, Konfabulator copied an idea from Apple, improved it, and now Apple is implementing desk accessories once again. I don't see a problem in that.

But I'm worried about security - and this is one reason why I never started to use Konfabulator in the first place (plus some usability issues). Installing all kinds of third-party extensions to Konfabulator is a security risk, and there should be some kind of certificate system to ensure a minimum amount of trustworthiness. Perhaps Apple can solve this issue better. On the other hand, the same issue of trust applies as well to separate applications.