Nokia has gone widget-mad, introducing full widget (mini-apps built on Ajax and Javascript) support into S60, beginning with S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 (so we're looking at next year for the first devices with full widget support). Widgets will run under 'Web Run-Time', as explained in the full press release, below.
Read on in the full article.
mmm... Over the last few years, i have tried hard to get into this widget craze. First with konfabulator under Windows 3 or 4 years ago, then with Widset on S60 and more recently with Dashboard on MacOSX. All my attempts have ended up in complete failure.
My experience with widgets is that the vast majority of them are utterly useless forcing you to spend ages browsing through a massive list of widgets to try and find one that could be potentially of any use. Once you've found it and use it, you quickly end up finding it far too limited for what you want to do and revert to using a full-fledged application or web site that serves your needs a lot better. At the end of the day, widgets just get in your way and aren't of much use.
Widgets were great 15 years ago (remember the Desktop Accessories under MacOS 6? really cool stuff at the time) when applications took ages to launch and operating systems were not quite multi-tasked. Then it did make sense to have mini-apps that you could bring up instantly at any time to perform a very specific task. But nowadays I really do not see the point. Most applications start pretty much instantly and you can leave them running in the background anyway. What's the point of having a widget displaying an RSS feed with the first few words of every article when you can have a full-blown RSS reader application allowing to easily follow dozens of RSS feeds simultaneously with a simple interface and display the whole article along with the embedded images and videos if you want to?
Add to that the fact that screen real-estate, memory, processor and bandwidth are really scarce resources on smartphones and I can not see how widgets could really work on this platform.
But maybe I'm just too old fashioned and not "Web 2.0" enough. Personally, I'd much prefer if Nokia spent more time in refining the S60 user interface and built-in applications to make them more suitable to both newbies and power users (make it very simple for users that just want to make phone calls and take pictures with their phones but allow power users to tweak every aspect of the UI and system to suit their needs) rather than implementing a widget framework.
Yeah, thanks, the mobile application development landscape surely is not yet fragmented enough, beside several mutually incompatible mobile browsers and Flash Lite one really needs a Nokia Web Runtime for widgets as well, and of course after that an SE/UIQ Web Runtime, and, and, and...
Sorry for my outburst, but that's getting downright silly, if you ask me.
On the other hand, well, I understand Nokia. One has to stay "buzzword compatible", nowadays. A company like Nokia absolutely must have an answer to a question like "What do *you* offer for Web 2.0?"
These widget things he was talking about can be done right now in java or symbian. With mobile weather, I get the weather forecast by simply launching the app right away. It connects to the web site and pulls the info then displays it on the screen, which is what a widget does. Gmail provides their own version in Java which does basically the same thing for Gmail. Widgets would make it easier since devs could do it in javascript, css etc, but many of the things he talked about in the podcast can be done now. Java is the standard in mobile phones, like it or not. I'm not sure yet another platform is needed.