Widgets made easy
Apple is now making it super easy for anyone to make desktop widgets, another tool that content-makers should exploit to push their content out to consumers. For those who don’t know, widgets are mini applications that run on desktops on the latest version of the Mac operating system. Visit the Apple dashboard page to see what I mean. Anyone can make a widget. But until now, you needed at least rudimentary coding skills.
Now comes Dashcode, which turns widget-making into a point-and-click, drag-and-drop affair. The software is still in beta - it’ll come out with the next version of the Apple OS. But you can play with it now if you sign up for Apple’s free developer connection.
I cobbled together a widget last night for our Inside Silicon Valley podcast. The widget periodically grabs the RSS feed of the podcast and lets you play the podcasts on your desktop. The learning curve here is not steep. Dashcode provides templates and walks you through the step-by-step process of widget creation. If you’re familiar with the widget concept, you can learn Dashcode in 10 minutes and have your first widget ready to go in another 10 minutes.
Here’s a download link to the alpha version of the podcast widget I created (you need Tiger to use it). It needs to be cleaned up and branded better. But it’s fully functional.
So what’s the value of this for newspapers or other media companies? True, the percentage of Mac users coming to your site is small, and the percentage who use widgets is even smaller. But you need to offer your content to people on their terms, not yours. If people want to read, listen to or watch your content off the web on their computer desktops or elsewhere, you’ve got to let them do that. And in this case, the up-front investment is almost nothing. Plus, widgets are a great way to push reminders out to users that you have new content. I created a widget for SilicionBeat when I was blogging there, and the last time I checked, it had several hundred downloads.
(Note: If you plan to make your own podcast widget, there’s a bug in the Dashcode podcast template that doesn’t allow widgets to read Feedburner podcast feeds. The workaround is to comment out line 23 of Podcast.js. Thanks to Christian Wagner of the Apple developer team for tracking down that bug for me and others.)