Apple Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 NL CD Mac Retail M9639N/A Merkblatt

Technology Brief
Mac OS X: Dashboard

The process of assembling the four files into a widget is very straightforward: Create 
a new directory, copy or move the files inside, and add the extension .wdgt to its name. 
This extension signals Mac OS X Tiger to treat the widget as a bundle. In the widget 
bundle shown below, the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS have been divided into three 
separate files to simplify debugging and localization.

A widget is simply a directory with a .wdgt extension containing an image file, icon, plist, 
and one or more files containing the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that implement the function 
of the widget. 

Learn More About Dashboard

A number of resources are available to help you learn more about Dashboard. To learn 
more about the features of Dashboard and the Dashboard widgets included in Mac 
OS X Tiger, visit www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html, Mac Help in Tiger, and 
Apple’s Support website at www.apple.com/support.

To learn more about how to create a widget, visit the Apple Developer website at 
developer.apple.com. You can also find developer tech notes at developer.apple.com/
technicalnotes. In addition, Mac OS X Tiger comes with full developer documentation, 
including information about Dashboard, WebKit, and Tiger technologies like Quartz and 
Core Image, as well as Xcode and the rest of the Tiger Software Development Kit (SDK). 

If you’d like to communicate with other widget developers to ask questions or learn 
more, you’re encouraged to participate in the Dashboard developer mailing list. Send 
email to Dashboard-dev@group.apple.com to join the list.

Many excellent references are available on the Internet that describe the standards-
based technologies used in Dashboard. To learn more about HTML, visit www.w3.org/
MarkUp. To learn more about JavaScript, visit www.mozilla.org/js/language. To learn 
more about CSS, visit www.w3.org/Style/CSS.