[m a d r a]

as a wannabe programmer, who's never managed to advance beyond a bit of PHP and actionscript, i'm full of admiration for those 'real' propellor heads out there, who can throw together a useful OSX app in the time it takes me to script a bit of interactivity on a website or a flash movie. "someday", i keep telling myself, "i'll get my head round cocoa and join the 'grown-ups' !" - and therein lies the rub;

with OSX making it relatively easy to start developing on a basic level [project builder/xtools and quite a lot of newbie-programmer documentation], apple allowed anyone who could follow a beginner's tutorial to inflict their version of - "textedit /notepad replacement / thing that goes in the dock or menubar and tells you something you already knew" upon us. some days, finding a 'real' app [and not some newbie's ego-trip] on macupdate or versiontracker is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haysyack.

and now with the advent of widgets, it looks like things are going to get a lot worse. now you don't even need to wrestle with cocoa, because the bar has been lowered again, to allow anyone who can string two lines of javascript together to jump on the "i'm a developer" bandwagon. i've seen widgets that connect to almost every website available [think about it folks - that's like requiring me to use a seperate browser for every website i visit] and countless widgets that make a multi-step process out of something you can do almost instantly via the GUI. classic example; a widget that "shows me my battery status" [oh. i see. if i want to know my battery status, i can either glance at the menubar or... bring up dashboard... wait for the widget to load... read my battery status... close dashboard again].

will things settle down after a week or two when the novelty wears off, or are we doomed to all be drowned in a sea of widgets?

[Ghoser777]

It will calm down. When OS X first came out, I wrote a bunch of dumb programs to start, and then after awhile I actually started making some useful programs. I just takes time for people to either get better or to get it out of their system.

[TampaDeveloper]

Are you saying you don't want to download my new screensaver Widget? Opening dashboard, loading my widget, and maximizing it will save wear and tear on your screen until your systems real screensaver kicks in. Plus, the black screen of my widget will fool your friends into thinking your computer is off... if you can find a way to hide its red border.

[RevEvs]

hey... at least we havent got a million clock widgets like konfab...... yet

But yes, i think there are going to be 50 rubbish widgets for each decent one. heck i even made a rubbish widget! I dont see the point in widgets that show results in a web browser, they whould parse data and show results in the widget..... (my widget showed results in a web browser... but i only made it as i was bored)

[PBG4 User]

Well, my Musical Scales program was nevered listed on Macupdate or VersionTracker simply because I suck at making websites. I think my program is decent but the webpage is subpar so I only spread info about it in my signature of message boards I visit.

It's definitely not the best thing since sliced bread, but it's pretty cool for what it does and has helped me learn Cocoa / Obj-C because I just dove in.