Widgetarium is an IDE for creating Dashboard Widgets. It include the following tools for making it easier and faster to create your Widget:
- Syntax Aware Editing: Editing your source code in an environment that provides language sensitive color, code completion, popup functions for easy navigation, split panes, full search & replace (including regular expression support), and all the other features you'd expect in a programming editor.
- Project management: Widgetarium is built around a "project" concept - this project file keeps track of all your sources, images, and any other file that you'd want to include in your Widget. It then correctly builds the Widget, setting all the various flags in various files correctly, copies the source files to the correct place, and can install the widget or compress it for uploading (and can even make it trivial to get a good, clean, screen shot of your running Widget)
- Dashboard Emulation: Instead of having to run your Widget in Safari or having to constantly kill/reload in Dashboard, Widgetarium provides a built in Dashboard simulator right inside the project. Your Widget code runs just like it would when running in Dashboard, including support for native plug-ins, and all the various Dashboard Widget extensions. Just type command-R and it runs - no switch, reloading, or other error prone extra steps. And if you Widget uses alert() to log messages, they also show up right in the project window(as well as various error messages - no need to dig through the Console).
- Widget Inspection: Besides running the Widget, you can also inspect the Widget itself. Since Widgets are effectively small web pages, there are a great many properties that are useful to know about. Widgetarium allows you to directly inspect the Document Object Model (DOM) corresponding to your Widget. Besides seeing the model hierarchy, you can examine the various nodes, including node properties, values, and other things (such as what the calculated style of a node is - great for figuring out why your Widget doesn't look quite right). You can even edit these values (where allowed by the underlying DOM). If you need more flexibility, you can even directly type in JavaScript that will be executed in the context of your Widget (great for adding various debugging routines).
- JavaScript Source Level Debugging: Widgetarium provides a full source level JavaScript debugger, allowing you to step through your code (including "step into calls", "step over calls" and "step out of routine"), set break points, see stack crawls, and view/edit local and global variables. Besides regular break points that stop the program execution, you can set trace points (that print out a message to log when that line is executed - far better than adding alert() calls since you won't need to remember to remove them), pause points (that briefly show that current source line), and sound points (play a sound when you hit a line).
- Graphic Tools: Programmers are rarely experts at graphic design, so Widgetarium makes it easy to create the basic graphics you'll need to create a Widget. From making the basic panel graphic (in various styles, custom colors, shapes, sizes, including the special "weave textured" back) to special button graphics and the Widget icon image, Widgetarium covers it. It even includes a special "slicer" designed to adapt existing images to be "stretched" at runtime for resizable Widgets or other user elements. Existing images also can be examines, with a special coordinate finder which allows you to see the coordinates of selected areas in a variety of formats that can be use in style sheets.
- Ready access to Documentation: There are handy links to a built in document browser that gives you instant access to Dashboard documentation and other related programming documentation (requires either XCode installation or an Internet connection).
- Quick Start Templates: Widgets can be created from a starting template, which will make the basic files, images, and standard behavior a Widget.
- Special Extensions: Widgets created using Widgetarium have access to special additional routines to perform a wide variety of actions not available to JavaScript. These include creating Spotlight queries, sound and speech, and direct integration of AppleScript scripts with your Widget.