Why widgets?
============

Thursday 18 February 2010 16:24

Opera is trying it again. Apple has tried with
Dashboard. But it still has failed to deliver that
killer widget. Or am I just to minimalistic to
appreciate widgets?

The whole point of widgets seems to be that the
creator of the widget can use rounded corners,
alpha transparency and drop shadows in a way that a
regular behaving application isn't allowed to have
because an application is supposed to follow the
rules of the graphical user interface of the
operating system it is running in. So instead of a
single solid general purpose RSS reader or media
player we're supposed to use half-assed custom
branded RSS reader or skinned media player widgets
for every single feed? That might be nice for the
creator of a widget or in a locked down branded
enterprise environment, but nobody else cares.

But what widgets also show is that nobody cares
about what the user interface should be offering to
applications in terms of functionality. Partly
because it is broken already. If an application
isn't very usable when it's window is less than
1024 pixels wide, and makes no sense having it's
window over 1600 pixels wide, why not just give up
that illusion of flexibility and pick a fixed size
for the window and optimize for that static
environment? And does the graphical interface of an
application survive all the customization that can
be done on fonts, dpi, colors or even the windowing
system itself? So why keep trying to cater for that
illusion of flexibility?

Because what I do like could be considered
full-screen widgets: running an application in full
screen mode without any graphical elements of the
interface visible. The browser for example is then
just the page, without toolbars, scroll bars or
anything. The interface is reduced to keyboard
shortcuts, just like when running applications in
80x25 text interfaces in the days of MS-DOS. Unless
you have a big screen or several screens where it
would make sense to view several windows next to
each other, optimizing applications to run full
screen - and I don't mean in a window maximized to
fill the screen - makes sense. That's why on the
tiny screens of mobile devices that is the way to
go. Switching between a couple of applications
becomes a more important task for an interface than
offering to try to show them running all at the
same time. Windows as the graphical representation
of a multi-tasking operating system is technically
more advanced then what users can handle. They just
get confused when you can insert any application
windowless inside a document in another
application.

The logical companion to a full screen application
are small alpha transparent pop-ups to receive
notifications from other applications, in a Growl
like way, but they should be more widget like so
they can contain more interactive elements. A
windows system and applications that are aimed at
providing this functionality, combined with strict
guidelines so the pop-ups don't grow into
applications themselves and you end up with the
same issues would be nice to have. While I don't
like the iPad as it's currently proposed, it could
be the first step towards systems that leverage
full-screen fixed mode application design for
somewhat bigger screens. Apple has the track record
pull something like that off, and else Steve has to
do it like with the NeXT.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2010/02/18/why-widgets/