On the Mark

I've told a lot of people, but I'm not sure I've told you--I think Apple's been pulling a scam since the dawn of the Dashboard. They tricked you into using widgets or they tricked you into building widgets--but either way, the widget economy boomed. 'Cause how do you get people to develop applications for a smartphone you can't announce until the last minute? You tell them they're developing for one thing, when in fact it's another. I've always thought that Dashboard widgets were meant to run on an Apple mobile device, one-at-a-time-ish. Shit, they already have the yellowpages on there. Now obviously, you'd need to corral the size and complexity of the widgets allowed to run on said device--that's what official dev tools are for.

Oh look, Dashcode. This is how platforms are born.