Reading this:
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/06/11/safariwin/index.php
It looks as though we may be just a step or two away from being able to produce widgets for Windows. Or is there more to it?
What good would a Windows widget do, exactly? where would it go?
We’re really no closer than we were before - the Web player has worked in other browsers for a long time, and the Dashboard widgets have been nothing more than repackaged Web players.
Personally, I think a widget has a very different feel to it than a Web player game. Some games are better suited to “life as widgets”. I wonder if Banana Warehouse would have gotten as many hits as a Web Player game as it has gotten as a widget. In some cases a widget but be redundant or impractical, but in some cases I think it would be quite preferable. I am not a big user of widgets but I think that the Widget Monkey widgets and Fugu games has well demonstrated the potential of that way of delivering content.
Also a widget can have a better feel because it’s just a click away. Sure you can say a web player is just as easy, but it feels more convenient to have your “toy” in the dashboard ready to play for a few mins at a time when ever you get the urge to do so. For that stuff I think widgets are great.
-Jeremy
It sounds like you might not be aware of Vista’s “Gadgets”.
And it would definitely take more than just having Safari on the OS to enable widgets. The dashboard is an OS feature that leverages the Safari browser to show a HTML layer with “widgets”. I just don’t ever see that appearing on Windows, at least not based on Safari… Gadgets are on the way and for years now folks on Windows have been able to use Konfabulator as well.
So, can we do Unity games as Windows widgets using Konfabulator?
Last I checked Konfabulator Widgets couldn’t include plugin/ActiveX control content like Unity web player files.