Have Apple simply given up on Widgets?

[mattwrit]

I'm loving the Apps on my iPhone - one of my favourites and most useful is a live train time app called, you guessed it, 'Trains'.

The App Store is so easy to search with tonnes of fun and useful apps. In contrast, the widget 'store' is rubbish. You can't search, there's very few genuinely useful widgets etc.

Has Apple given up? Surely the best way would be to allow iPhone apps to work on the dashboard?

 

[Catfish_Man]

That'd be really really difficult to do technically.

 

[mattwrit]

Really?! Why?

 

[Cromulent]

Really?! Why?

Because iPhone applications are written for the ARM processor and would require an emulator somewhat akin to when Intel users run a PowerPC application in Rosetta. Not only that but the iPhone APIs are not available on the Mac and the hardware is completely different.

 

[Catfish_Man]

Yeah, you'd basically need to run the iPhone emulator* in dashboard... and figure out a better way of faking multitouch input on the desktop, since so many iPhone apps rely on it.


*after improving it a good deal. I've heard no end of complaints about the current one.