Dashboard Widgets are Going Downhill Fast

February 6, 2007 | Posted in OS X | 8 Comments »

When Dashboard was an infant, Apple provided developers with guidelines for developing effective and useful dashboard widgets. If you look at the “Top 50″ Dashboard widgets on the Apple Downloads site, you will find that a good portion of the most popular widgets don’t even follow Apple’s guidelines. At All.

Apple’s guidelines for developing Dashboard widgets are a good set of rules to follow, given that they will probably produce a better long-term widget, as opposed to a viral, short-lived DashToy. Not only do a lot of widget developers ignore best practices (make them small, unobtrusive, and avoid embedding flash, just to name a few), some widgets even require CPU usage when idle! By far, the worst category is obviously the games.

Here is a picture of all Top 50 running in Dashboard at once

Can you honestly say that you would use more than 3-5 of these on a regular basis? This isn’t how Dashboard was intended to be used. And things will only get worse from here. With the release of OS X Leopard, we will see even more useless widgets, given the inclusion of an easier widget making tool provided by Apple.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 10:12 pm and is filed under OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “Dashboard Widgets are Going Downhill Fast”

Dylan Greene Feb 7, 07 at 11:43 am

What can Apple and/or the open source community be doing to prevent this?

Free templates that follow the guidelines? Certification process? Forced-style frameworks? Easy to re-skin system?

Vista and web widgets are having this same problem.
Jason Feb 10, 07 at 6:49 pm

Who cares? Just use the widgets you want, clearly other people are doing the same.
Ronald Rich Feb 11, 07 at 7:38 am

Fanboys circle jerk to oblivion.
Kate Feb 19, 07 at 5:02 am

The best will rise to the top. As my mother always said, “Don’t worry about other peoples’ manners; worry about your own.” :) Meaning, get busy designing gorgeous standards-compliant widgets, get people using them and help educate users so they begin to scoff at sub-standard work. It’s best to lead by example, as you are with this site. You won me as a fan for life with your statement that you were sick of the ugliness out there and just wanted to put some beauty out there in your free time, for free. Afterall, as the old saying goes, “you can be part of the problem or part of the solution.” Well done. :)
Jt Hollister Apr 23, 07 at 10:45 pm

Hey, I like the lava lamp…

:P
Hollister Queen Dec 17, 07 at 12:16 pm

I luvv the woopie Cushion!!!! LOL
HI Dec 17, 07 at 12:18 pm

R U BAD?
Estetik Jan 22, 08 at 6:39 pm

http://www.estetik-merkezleri.com

Thanks !