Dashboard Editor

Cult of Mac reports on a WYSIWYG editor for Dashboard widgets that may come from Apple. I hope so! There’s a lot that can be improved over making widgets now.

• Live HTML editing is awesome, especially given the CSS tricks you have to pull off for Dashboard. I like Firefox, but I use it for development because of the Web Developer Toolbar that lets me edit CSS in real-time.
• I want tutorials on how to make glassy and plasticy effects in Photoshop. It’s hard! And ugly widgets are no fun.
• Anything to get rid of the save-double-click-remember-to-press-command-and-option-when-you-click-the-button-now-open-the-Console-to-see-where-the-errors-where development cycle for Dashboard now. Seriously. You can test much of the layout in Safari, but what about debugging window.widget calls?
• Get rid of the stupid boilerplate we need to make the “rollie” i in the corner of widgets. Asking widget developers to just copy in 100+ lines of code into their JavaScript is sloppy. Especially because the animation code is annoyingly non-general.

My widget coming soon! I hope!