At Macworld Today
Adam and I spent the morning in San Francisco attending the Macworld keynote. Terrific show — Steve Jobs really knows how to talk about his products in a way that simulates that part of the brain that controls consumer desire[1], and I was happy to have a chance to see him do it in person.
If you were there (or if you caught the webcast, which should be available online real soon now), you saw Steve demonstrate a new technology called Dashboard that will be a part of Mac OS Tiger. Dashboard is intended to be a platform for little utility applications (in essence, what the Mac used to call ‘desk accessories’, but way better and easier to develop.) Steve demoed some widgets that display the current weather, a stock ticker, a dictionary/thesaurus, and so on. Very neat stuff.
If you were paying attention toward the end of the demo, you saw Steve fire up a little eBay widget. This is a real app that uses the eBay API to display a list of eBay items you’re bidding on. Adam worked on it over the past few weeks with folks from Apple; we’re hoping to make it generally available in some fashion around the time that Tiger is released.
[1] I bought an iPod Shuffle for no reason. Then when I realized I had no reason to own one, I bought another one for my wife. That’s how good the guy is.
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