There are some known issues - the page has been checked to work in Safari best. Most of the widgets will also work in Firefox except the world clock and the sliding tile game - I have chosen to replace the front of these widgets with dummy non-functioning faces. You can still move them around the page though! Internet Explorer doesn't like widgets, pngs, messes up CSS and other stuff, it was all I could do to get the pop-up google search widget working -so the page does not work in Internet Explorer. I've chosen to display a banner across the page if you use a browser that isn't Firefox or Safari.

 

Most of the widgets are taken from Apple Mac OS X's dashboard (see links below). A widget generally consist of a small folder of html and graphics, but when used in a web browser, they are fixed and not draggable about the page. Some also use custom calls that only work in Safari and OS X. To enable them to move, I've added a little 'click and drag' tab to some of the widgets. Because the pongclock's controls are the up and down arrow keys, playing it may cause the screen to move up and down - you can still play it if you persevere!

 

Widget settings and preferences are not saved. The asteroids widget will try to connect to a server for high score recording. To enable this. you need to click Settings in the Adobe Flash Player Security window that pops up.

 

Repeated refreshing of the page can sometimes cause the widgets to load incorrectly. Safari particularly seems to get its iframes mixed up at times. If this happens close the browser window and re-open the page. If that doesn’t work, quit the browser then re-open the page.

 

As a sort of counter-illustration of the dragging facility, I’ve fixed the position of two of the widgets, the Google Maps and the Matrix widget, so no, you can’t more them about the screen! You can however move the other widgets over and under them.

 

I haven’t added close buttons to the widgets - only the close button on the site-wide google search widget works (click the Search link in the footer as previously mentioned), but it would be simple enough to hide all widgets when the page loads and click a button to get them to display.

 

Before I get all the adverse comments about hacking, sloppy programming, poor presentation, browser incompatibility and so on, just let me say I didn't know about what dashboard widgets actually were until a few weeks ago, never having needed to open one up to see what was inside. And I am still nowhere near to understanding any of the complex javascript that surrounds some of these widgets (see Cyclosaurus for all that ;-) ), nor any of the code that makes widgets draggable and flippable in OS X for that matter.