May MoMo London
-
Yesterday’s Mobile Monday London was all about widgets. Several concepts were covered that I hadn’t previously thought about… -
The prospect of Ad funded widgets.
-
S60 widgets within the idle screen. This won’t be possible. Instead they will run from shortcuts on the idle screen. I suspect (but don’t actually know) this has something to do with inter-process platform security.
-
The idea of a connection manager to aggregate requests from multiple widgets so as to optimise resource (network connection/battery) usage.
- The idea that widgets might be invoked from facilities within the phone. eg To perform some action based on a contact, calendar appointment or place.
-
The idea that widgets might use (call) each other and even expose their own APIs to C++ or Java code.
MoMo identified some issues to be resolved before widgets realise their full potential…
- Fragmentation. Do publishers really want to create different widgets for iPhone, S60, Widsets, Opera etc? Will end users understand the difference?
- Security. How will widgets access phone features such as alarms, contacts and calendar? At network operator’s request, these have been locked down within Java and Symbian C++. It’s unlikely they will open these things up again. This suggests some kind of signing and, as a consequence, levels of trust between widgets?
-
Trust. Allied to security, users will need to know when use of widgets will cost them money. This might be solved by having some kind of warning when a widget exceeds a certain amount of network data usage. Also, users also need some way of knowing they are not installing rouge widgets.
Despite the hype (particularly from Nokia), I see widgets as (yet another) fragmented development tool. Nokia say that it only takes about five days to convert a widget to S60. I ask why it takes any time at all? Instead Nokia should be championing standards for cross-platform widgets (as Opera are). Nokia also say there’s nothing proprietary about their widgets. Again, I wonder about this when there must be some mechanism to allow the widget to install and appear as a built-in application as well as provide custom APIs into the S60 platform.
As I have previously mentioned, allowing arbitrary people to create widgets increases the possibility of reduced device performance (speed and battery life). I can see one solution might be for the system to alert the user about specific widgets that are slowing down the device and causing excessive battery consumption.
Related Articles: