Widgetarium 1.0

Widgetarium is an integrated development environment (IDE) for developing Dashboard widgets. It combines a programming editor that supports JavaScript, HTML and CSS with a packager that creates ".wdgt" packages, and a Dashboard emulator, allowing you to run and test your widget right in Widgetarium. The emulator includes support for most of the widget extensions, including system, launchURL, launchApplication, preferenceForKey/setPreferenceForKey, setCloseBoxOffset. It also includes prepareForTransition/performTransition (though these currently do nothing). You can also explicitly call your dragstart, dragstop, show, hide, focus, blur, and remove handlers. The dashboard emulator shows a JavaScript console, so you're just a double click away from finding your errors, as well as support for explicit logging calls (you can also just type in code to execute).

Widgetarium also supports a DOM inspector so you can see what the parts of your widgets are (and what style they have, attributes, Javascript properties, etc...). The dashboard emulator has been enhanced to show the widget on a transparent gray background, and can be dragged, and even resized (for resizable widgets).

You can even directly test your localization resources without having to change your system localization!

To get started, create a new Widgetarium project, drag your source, html, style sheet, and image files to the project, and run (or start from one of the basic templates). If you've already got a widget you're working on, you can create a new project by importing the sources and structure directly from that widget. Widgetarium builds your plist for you (which you can adjust explicitly), and copies all the files into the resulting ".wdgt" file, all ready to be installed in Dashboard.

For questions/support, please check the Web board.