I just have to adjust my design a bit - no problem.
Cheers mate
Andrew
On 10 May 2005, at 20:38, Christian wrote:
On May 10, 2005, at 10:46 AM, Andrew Knott wrote:
I've started experimenting with creating a widget that could talk
to other widgets on a local network through Bonjour.
At the moment I have a working Cocoa app that browses for a
particular service and a Widget that toggles the availability of a
service with the service being instantiated by a widget plugin.
And it works!
Which brings me to a quick question. I don't have a huge amount of
Bonjour experience and so I'm not sure of the architecture I
should use to get rid of the Cocoa app side of things and have the
widget responsible for not only looking for a service of a
particular type on the network but also instantiating one if one
is not available. Actually, is it advisable to actually be
designing a widget like this or is it all cool?
Andrew--
I wouldn't recommend it, based on practical and philosophical grounds.
Practically speaking, widgets aren't run until the user first shows
Dashboard, so you can't count on the widget itself starting any
processes at boot/login. Also, some installers place icons in the
Dock, a process that involves killing the Dock. As you can guess,
widgets aren't restarted automatically - the user needs to show
Dashboard before they're running again.
Philosophically speaking, widgets tend to present information. A
widget like yours should focus on getting the user the information
he needs as quickly and effectively as possible and handing them
off to applications or webpages when serious interaction is
needed. In that sense, they're transitory - they can come and go
and not have any effect on the system. Notice that none of the
Apple widgets edit user data and that no system service depends on
a widget?
Applications are better suited to running background processes and
providing the functionality "meat-and-potatoes" - they can handle
setting preferences more elegantly, provide better interfaces,
etc. Use your widget to compliment an application, like this
example from the docs:
"An example of judicious use of a widget is to provide a front end
for a time card application. The application provides all of the
features needed by the user, while a companion widget lets you
clock in and out and choose the job that you’re currently working on."
Hope that helps...
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