So oddly, Dashboard claims you can use plugins in your widgets, but I
have not yet gotten this plugin to work in a widget -- I'm probably
just doing something stupid.
Incidentally, is there a way to init a QCView with a URL rather than
a file path? I ended up just downloading the URL to a temp file and
initing the view that way, but it felt kind of dirty.
Thanks for the suggestions, by the way!
Mike
On Apr 30, 2005, at 12:44 PM, Pierre-Olivier Latour wrote:
Is there any mechanism to embed and control qc from inside of a
dashboard widget? The embedding part is pretty straightforward by
just using a quicktime embedded object, but I was wondering if
it's possible to bind to any of the qc variables from javascript
in safari?
You basically have three possibilities to integrate Quartz Composer
with Dashboard:
1) Embed the composition in a QuickTime movie. It's the easiest,
but doesn't provide control on the frame rate or any possible
interaction with the composition
2) Write a plug-in for the widget that would add a QCView to the
widget's window. From the widget plug-in, you can get the WebKit
view and should be able to add subviews to it. Then the widget plug-
in can also provide javascript extensions to control the
composition. That's still quite a bit of work and "hacky" too.
3) Write a WebKit Cocoa plug-in: subclass QCView, make it respond
to the informal WebPlugIn protocol, put that in a .webplugin bundle
in Library/Internet Plug-Ins. At the same time, thanks to the new
JavaScript / Cocoa bindings, you can expose the QCView methods
through JavaScript. This is the best approach but I'm not sure you
can put a WebKit plug-in inside a widget: you might have to install
it separately. Everything you need should be in the documentation: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/InternetWeb/Conceptual/
WebKit_PluginProgTopic/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001521
Unfortunately, I don't have any sample code available for that
right now, so you're on your own. Good luck :)
