Back before iPhone took the concept of mini apps and turned it on its head, widgets were a Mac user’s best friend. Released in 2005 as one of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger’s celebrated features, Dashboard opened a hidden layer of specialized tools designed to provide “fingertip access” to common tasks and simple utilities. For OS X users with cluttered Docks and overstuffed bookmarks bars, it was love at first sight.
But what started as a passionate affair quickly fizzled into a relationship of convenience. The promise of widgets for every conceivable function gave way to a slew of crude clocks, calculators, and aggregators. Users of aging Macs also blamed Dashboard’s invisible background processes for performance hits and drained batteries.
“When widgets premiered, they were new and interesting,” says print designer Brian Hunter. “But sadly, the downside was that they were always running in the background, so I deactivated as many as possible.”
Some users weren’t content to merely close widgets. Inspired by his “hatred of not knowing if [Dashboard] was running,” Natal Vande Casteele created the unofficial DisableDashboard widget, and Mesa Dynamics president Danny Espinoza launched the Amnesty widget “to free widgets from the Dashboard modal space.” Other users tinkered with Terminal to free up precious RAM, and a few held out hope for new features that were slow to arrive.
Today, there are 46 times as many iPhone apps as Dashboard widgets. Why is one app platform enthusiastically embraced by developers and another universally shunned? In a word: money.
“Difficulty in generating revenue is likely the driving factor behind the apparent lack of developer interest in Dashboard,” says Stephen Mitchell, who developed the Countdown X widget. “People simply don’t expect to pay for the use of widgets.”
Without the rigid approval process of the App Store or any way to develop a consistent revenue stream, developers paid little mind to capturing a broad audience and began to pigeonhole widgets to fit their specific needs.
Since Apple hasn't done much to Dashboard, our widgets seem so 2005.
“It seems that the platform has been adopted primarily by those leaning toward the power-user side of things, and it’s extremely useful to them,” Mitchell says. “Without revenue as a key factor in development, the driving force behind my own widget development has simply been the fact that I write widgets I know that I personally will use.”
And apart from new Movies and Web Clip widgets in Leopard, Apple has done little to promote or improve Dashboard--it’s even lost its prime spot on Apple.com--ignoring developers’ pleas for streamlined downloads and users’ calls for more flexibility.
“Apple never really added any new functionality to Dashboard, a decision that’s always puzzled us,” Espinoza notes. Apple’s apathy is equally puzzling to developers of semi-popular widgets, making it difficult for them to support such a thankless platform.
“As a user, I absolutely see the usefulness of the Dashboard,” says Andreas Amann, creator of the Sports Fan widget. “However, it’s extremely hard to make any money off Dashboard widgets, which somewhat lessens the appeal.”
Though Amann remains committed to providing “feature-rich widgets,” he admits to spending more time developing profitable iPhone apps, a dilemma he doubts will be rectified anytime soon: “I don’t expect many changes to Dashboard in the future. iPhone OS is too different to be able to merge with Dashboard, and the skill set required is very different.”
And you probably shouldn’t hold your breath for a mobile version of Amnesty, either.
“A bunch of exclusively JavaScript and HTML widgets are really nothing more than pretty web pages,” Espinoza says. “And what iPhone user wants that?”
