Hands on: Coding for the desktop

The Dashboard in Apple’s OSX 10.4 lets you install mini applications called widgets, which run in the background and can be displayed at any time.

Dashboard has striking similarities to Konfabulator. This is arguably superior, since it allows applets to run on the desktop. Konfabulator is also cross-platform.

You can create Konfabulator widgets that run both on Windows and OSX. Konfabulator was acquired by Yahoo last year, renamed the Yahoo Widget Engine (YWE) and is now free.

Aside from being cross-platform, the main reason to create a YWE widget rather than a standard application is accessibility.

YWE installs as an icon in the Windows system tray, or you can press F8 at any time to display your favourite widgets on top of other applications. You also get cool transparency effects and a small but handy runtime library.

Coding for YWE
To code a widget, download and install the SDK (software developer’s kit) from Yahoo. Once installed, the Yahoo Widget Engine will sit in your system tray, along with some documentation and sample widgets.

Now you can open up a programming and image editor and start coding. If you can, set your editor to treat kon files as XML for the purpose of syntax highlighting.

You need an image editor that lets you to create png images, including the option to set a transparent colour. Create a new image sized at 250x250 pixels, and draw a circle in the middle, as big as will fit in the image.

Fill the area outside the circle with any colour and designate it the transparent colour. Then save the image as round.png.

Open the programmer’s editor and create an XML file as follows:

on


main
250
250


200


18
center
130
Hands On Widget


clock
18
center
170
Wait...