Mac OS X widgets can run on Windows 7 with the Kludget Engine. The stock dashboard widgets that come with Mac OS, the ones that do not require plugins, ran smoothly when tested with the Kludget Engine (version 0.9.8)

Shown on this screenshot are the following widgets:

• Calculator
• ESPN
• Google
• Movies
• Stickies
• Stocks
• Tile Game
• Weather

An update is forthcoming. So stay tuned.

The Opera Widget Engine is also an HTML based widget engine like Dashboard. This makes it a good candidate for the Kludget Engine compatibility.

Visit widgets.opera.com to test run some of them. Opera support in Kludgets is still in early stage to expect some broken widgets.

This is built and tested on Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04).

Running on Ubuntu 9.04

Instructions

• Extract the file kludget..tar.gz
• Open Kludgets application

Warning: Beta Build!

kludgets-0.9.1.linux.tar.gz

Running on Ubuntu 9.04

Kludget Engine will be available on Linux pretty soon. For those who can’t wait, download the source code from the repository. It’s almost always to up to date.

You’ll need qt 4.5, and developer tools.

Warning: This is a little bit of a technical post.

When a widget is installed by the engine, it will prompt you to grant access permissions. There are a lot of widgets that will require system commands. They usually come in the form of shell commands like:

/usr/bin/id
or
/usr/bin/curl

And these commands are called in javascript through the widget.system() method.

These commands will require linux or linux-like environment like MacOS. (Is MacOS techincally linux?). On windows, we emulate this environment using Cygwin. It’s a linux-like environment for Windows.

Go there.

Download the installer. Choose the packages you need. You’ll need to install a shell package like bash or sh. Installation is pretty easy and straight forward.

You then have to edit the engine preference and check “Run system commands inside a shell”. And point the shell path to your Cygwin shell. (There’s a default sample entry to help you out.)

With cygwin, a majority of widgets that use system command will now run smoothly. But there would still be commands that are available only on MacOS.

The Say Cheese, daily comics widget use /usr/bin/pbcopy to paste an comic image on the clipboard. pbcopy isn’t available in cygwin, so someone will have to port or make a version of that. This is one area where contributors can come in.

In true Kludget fashion, we use cygwin as a component to make the dashboard widgets work. Cygwin is several MBs of disk space, depending on you packages. Do you think it’s worth it? I’m interested in your comments.

One feature that’s repeatedly requested through email and comments is the F12 hotkey. It will definitely be included in the feature list.

• F12 Hotkey – to show and hide the widgets
• WidgetDock – a widget manager widget
• Animations and Effects – not a priority for now
• Plugins – QT-based to make it really easy to create. I’ve sample codes of the dashboard’s plugins, really messy.
• More widgets – include a larger set of default widgets. dictionary, calendar, maps, system stats.
• Linux – because it’s QT based, we could easily make a linux version of the engine. Or even a MacOS version. (Thanks QT and Nokia)

What other features do you think should be included?