Here''s my crazy question of the day. Has anybody played around with using Rails to create Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets? Or is that just sick and wrong? Giles
> Has anybody played around with using Rails to create Mac OS X > Dashboard Widgets? > > Or is that just sick and wrong?Neither, in my opinion but from my understanding, Mac OS X Widgets (and Yahoo! Widgets) are built, for the most part, with HTML+CSS+Javascript. I think you can also leverage built-in Mac OS X libraries and run *Ruby* scripts inside your widget since Ruby is shipped with the OS. Alas, RoR does not come shipped with Mac OS X (yet?). You could build web services with RoR to feed your widget but the actual widgets only use client-side web technology. developer.apple.com/macosx/dashboard.html
On 3/27/06, Dean Matsueda <dmatsueda@bsr.org> wrote:> > Has anybody played around with using Rails to create Mac OS X > > Dashboard Widgets? > > > > Or is that just sick and wrong? > > Neither, in my opinion but from my understanding, Mac OS X Widgets (and > Yahoo! Widgets) are built, for the most part, with HTML+CSS+Javascript. > I think you can also leverage built-in Mac OS X libraries and run *Ruby* > scripts inside your widget since Ruby is shipped with the OS. Alas, RoR > does not come shipped with Mac OS X (yet?). > > You could build web services with RoR to feed your widget but the actual > widgets only use client-side web technology. > > developer.apple.com/macosx/dashboard.htmlwell -- I think it may depend on if dashboard supports hrefs. if it does, you could probably actually do it if you just put a javascript statement in the widget. the JS would be a localhost href to a Ruby script which would launch WEBrick, and that script could then forward the "browser" (Dashboard) to a Rails app running on localhost using WEBrick and SQLite. and from there on in, yeah, web services, or Ajax, or anything really. I do actually think there''s a very strong possibility of sick and wrong here, to be honest with you. (on the bright side, it''s also a great excuse to buy a Mac.) -- Giles Bowkett www.gilesgoatboy.org
Even if you find some crazy way to do this the problem is that it would most likely only work on your computer. Widgets are not actually run through a webserver but are opened using the browser engine opening a local file. Thus you are limited to the things Safari can do with local files. On 3/27/06, Giles Bowkett <gilesb@gmail.com> wrote:> Here''s my crazy question of the day. > > Has anybody played around with using Rails to create Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets? > > Or is that just sick and wrong? > > > Giles > _______________________________________________ > Rails mailing list > Rails@lists.rubyonrails.org > http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails >-- -------------- Jon Gretar Borgthorsson
On Mar 28, 2006, at 10:53 AM, Jon Gretar Borgthorsson wrote:> Even if you find some crazy way to do this the problem is that it > would most likely only work on your computer. Widgets are not actually > run through a webserver but are opened using the browser engine > opening a local file. Thus you are limited to the things Safari can do > with local files. > > On 3/27/06, Giles Bowkett <gilesb@gmail.com> wrote: >> Here''s my crazy question of the day. >> >> Has anybody played around with using Rails to create Mac OS X >> Dashboard Widgets? >> >> Or is that just sick and wrong?You could also have standard widgets calling a Rails application across the web though. -- Jason Perkins jperkins@sneer.org "The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases." - Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy