There’s lots of ways right now to extend the web outside of a traditional web browser. Whether you call them gadgets or widgets, web-enabled desktop mini-apps can be a powerful way to bridge the divide between your users’ machines and your Internet applications.
With all the gadget platforms out there, it can be tough to sift through the options. But in reality, most of the gadget engines are nothing more than glorified web page renderers. If you know HTML and you’re comfortable with JavaScript, you’re already well on your way to churning out your own custom gadgets.
Using the Operating System
First off, there are the operating system platforms. Microsoft’s Windows Vista ships with a gadget tool-strip called the Sidebar. Apple’s OS X includes Dashboard, an application for running widgets. The advantage of these OS platforms is that they come pre-installed.
If you’re targeting a Microsoft Vista shop, you can deploy Sidebar gadgets out of the box without installing any additional software. And if your users are Apple-holics, you can be sure that every shiny new Macbook out there will be able to run your Dashboard Widget.
Cross-Platform Support
If you’re not catering to a single OS, cross-platform engines might be a better solution. Yahoo’s Widgets and Google’s Desktop Gadgets engines both run on Windows 2000, XP and Vista, as well as on newer versions of OS X. But users need to install the engine software before they can use your gadgets.
Mighty Apollo
Adobe’s Apollo runtime is the latest entry into the competition for the desktop. Apollo offers Flash, Flex, and AJAX functionality and hooks into a machine’s file system. But it can also be used simply to render HTML based mini-apps.
And if you’ve got Flash or Flex capabilities, you can pull off some very cool things in Apollo that you can’t do easily on the other platforms. Still, the barrier to entry is that users need to install the Apollo runtime on their machines. Given Adobe’s reach with the Flash player, this will become less and less of a problem over time.
Lack of Standards
Unfortunately, there are no common platform or format standards for gadgets. Each system has its quirks. Most require some kind of file for defining settings and options. Each one offers different hooks into extended desktop functionality that isn’t available to pages inside a regular web browser.
Learning the different API hooks is easy. But the differences prevent you from deploying one gadget for all of the platforms. The lesson here is to consider your audience. Make your mini-apps accessible to the people who will end up using them. With a little planning and understanding of the differences between platforms, you might even be able to repackage your HTML and scripting code for use in multiple of the platforms.