Dashcode democratises widget wrangling

Stephen Withers
Sunday, 24 December 2006 13:15

Your IT - Home IT

Apple has delivered a modest yet still welcome Christmas present to Mac users in the form of a beta release of Dashcode, a new tool for developing widgets "even if you've never written a line of code."

 

Widgets are mini-applications, typically involving some sort of web-based service and written in JavaScript. Dashcode - revealed in the 'sneak peek' at Leopard earlier this year - cuts the development effort by providing a range of templates and an IDE that takes the project from design and layout, through coding and debugging to deployment.

While Dashcode will be a part of Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard), the current beta has been "scaled back" for compatibility with 10.4 so it can be tested by a wider community. That said, users are required to sign up for Apple's (free) Developer Connection programme before they can download the software.

The Dashcode beta expires on 15 July 2007, and we imagine the readers of entrails will include that fact in their prognostications about Leopard's release date.