Yahoo Widget Interpretter
 

How easy would it be to create a Yahoo (previously Konfabulator) Widget interpretter?

As I understand it, people write Widgets in a combination of Java and XML. If it were possible to write an engine that could interpret these natively within Maemo, then hey presto, we suddenly have access to every widget ever developed for other platforms, in a perfect fit for Maemo's big bright colourful screen and always-on connectivity. It would increase its desirability and user appeal tenfold.

Anyway, just an idea :-)


d

I love this idea. While we're at it, running OS X Dashboard Widgets would be great.

I thought I had read about an OSS project to run these on Linux. I´ll try to find the link.

My first thought is that the Java runtime package is pretty huge, and the 770 has a pathetic amount of on-board RAM to store it in.

A killer app!
 

The Yahoo Widget Engine used to be the Konfabulator. This kind of app would be very very cool on the 770. It runs a combination of JavaScript and XML and widgets are very easy to create. There's even a nice debugging environment.

It's a MacOS Dashboard for the PC.

However, the YWE is very memory intensive. I'm running 3 widgets right now -- a clock, a weather watcher, and a todo list -- and they are together sucking up 14MB of memory. There's an instance of the YWE for each widget. I'm afraid memory would be gone in a hurry for the 770.

This would be a killer app for the 770.

-F

As already pointed out, Dashboard does not use Java, only Javascript.

And I would also like to say that the Sharp Zaurus ran Java relatively well, with less memory than the 770. Heck, even my Nokia phone runs Java...

Nokia really needs to put out a java micro edition implmenetation for the 770. Your phone likely uses j2ME which can be very small.
The ARM processor on the thing even has the capacity to do hardware accleration for java.

J2ME(MIDP2.0, CLDC, & Bluetooth) would give us a whole ton of apps & games for the thing, and the ability to very easily write new ones even outside of the maemo dev kit.

Agreed on this; I didn't run Konfabulator on my Dell C600 because it was too resource-intensive, for what should be a relatively simple task - especially for a background app. I guess the Konfabulator team just decided not to worry about system resources in the same way you'd have to for smaller devices, and of course they had to make the programming simple for users.

I'd expect/hope that the engine COULD be a lot simpler while still remaining compatible with existing widgets - it's starting to sound like perhaps it would be easier to support Dashboard widgets than YWE - and looking at the download page there's plenty of those too. The trick is "just" getting Java or Javascript on board :-I

J2ME sounds logical in many respects; but I guess Nokia have to think about how existing J2ME apps fit in with the 770's screen, lack of keyboard and usage profile.


[d]

The 770 does have a much higher resolution than most devices using j2ME. But it also has a couple of zoom buttons. No reason the midlets can't be made to scale through hardware.
The device doesn't have a enough internal storage for j2SE, so j2ME would be ideal.
The other hardware buttons and onscreen keyboard would be more than sufficient for midlets.