Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

KDE 4 to Support Apple Dashboard Widgets

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the apple-setting-accidental-standards dept.

Ryan writes to tell us Applexnet is reporting that Zack Rusin, a lead developer of KDE, has confirmed that KDE 4 will be able to run and display Dashboard widgets similar to Mac OS X 10.4. From the article: "Basically, this means that a layer (similar in some ways to layers in Adobe Photoshop) in the KDE desktop could function the same way that Dashboard does in Mac OS X. Widgets themselves are not inherently difficult to write nor properly interpret, since they are usually just HTML and Javascript (although Cocoa code can be included, the developer's skills permitting). Furthermore, since Konqueror and Safari share very nearly the same rendering engine, KHTML and WebKit, this too will simplify the process."

3 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. Exciting by BrenBren · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think this is a great idea. Right off the bat, there will be lots of Widgets available.

    The Apple community will also benefit, because there are probably a lot of people in the Linux community that will write new Widgets that haven't been thought of (or thought necessary) by the Apple programming community.

    I, for one, welcome our new Widget overlords.

  2. Re:Why a separate layer? by thatguywhoiam · · Score: 5, Insightful
    That's just apple's workaround for "we think virtual desktops are too complicated." No need to impose that on KDE.

    That's just your workaround for explaining Apple's more elegant solution to the problem...

    --
    If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
  3. Re:Memory Usage by theAtomicFireball · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't believe I'm posting hits, because I'm usually playing the drooling Mac fan-boy part in this here Slashdot play we're all in, but...

    Do you realize how inefficient even a 12 meg memory footprint for something that pulls down like 20 bytes of weather data from a URL and then displays that data along with an image to indicate whether it's sunny, raining, or snowing? Widgets are a great idea, but they ARE memory hogs and take far more processor cycles than they should to do their job. They are not the best example of software engineering to ever come out of Cupertino by any stretch of the imagination.