Jackfield: Apple’s Dashboard for the Linux Gnome desktop
It’d be cool if Linux had Apple’s Dashboard. For those of you who don’t know about it, Dashboard allows Mac OS X users to build little applications using nothing more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That’s very neat.
(Sidebar: For those of you saying “what about gdesklets!”, let me just say: no. The whole reason that Dashboard is good is that it lets ordinary people who know about the web build widgets. Having to use some odd XML dialect means that it’s like real programming. That’s why there are more Dashboard widgets than gdesklets, even though gdesklets has been around for ages. End sidebar.)
I started to have a look at how difficult it would be to implement this on Linux, using Mozilla’s Gecko as the underlying web library. (I could have done it with KHTML, I suppose, and that would have been more likely to match with Apple’s WebKit since WebKit is a fork. I didn’t, though, because I understand Mozilla and Gtk much, much better than I understand either KHTML or Qt/KDE. I’d love to see a KHTML version.) The theory was that it should use existing Dashboard widgets, giving new users a huge library of stuff that already ran to choose from. In essence, the idea isn’t too difficult to do. It requires:
- Making something that understands the Dashboard widget definition format, so it can parse existing widgets
- Building a Gtk app that embeds Gecko and displays the widgets
- Injecting some extra JavaScript into each widget that takes care of differences between Gecko and WebKit
The first two weren’t that difficult. The third…more complex than you might think. Safari and Firefox (WebKit and Gecko) differ in a lot of ways, and (understandably, and not at all reprehensibly) Dashboard widgets don’t take account of those ways because they are only built to run on WebKit. I got a reasonable proportion of the ways done, but there’s still enough that there aren’t many widgets that it actually runs correctly. I now, sadly, don’t have time to continue to work on the project, but I’d love to see someone else take up the slack.I’m working on the project again. It’s called Jackfield, for reasons that I can barely remember (I think I looked “dashboard” up in a thesaurus somewhere).
A screenshot of the existing program, with the Jackfield toolbar and some widgets running:
You can grab the Jackfield code (2.7MB tar.gz) if you’re interested in looking into it or working further on it. To run, cd into the jackfield directory and run python Control.py for the command syntax. You’ll need some widgets, too. Have a play around if you’re interested.
Update (2006-07-07): don’t download the tarball. Instead, read the more up-to-date install instructions.
Oh, and one quick note: my personal wiki has the notes I made while building the project to the state it’s in at http://kryogenix.org/wiki/Jackfield if that’s helpful.
3 minutes later
Nice! I think one of KDE plasma’s goals is Dashboard widget compatibility, so the KHTML port may already be taken care of.
9 hours later
If a support request here is inappropriate, please ignore it.
When I run ‘python Control.py start showing’, an empty gray control bar shows up on my screen.
I take it the widgets in the ‘widget’ folder of the download are actually supposed to function.
So; how do I get on from here?
6 days later
Emil: the code is hardcoded to look for the widgets directory in a particular place. Edit Control.py and change WIDGET_DIRS to contain the widget directory, or put the widget directory as ~/Library/Widgets or ~/Projects/jackfield/Widgets and it should work a little better.
This is purely because it’s unfinished…
7 days later
After extracting the .tar.gz file, what do I do to install the application? I tried the command : python Control.py
but I received an error of some sort.
(Sorry, I’m new Linux..)
10 days later
horace: be warned, the code is not in a usable state. The “error of some sort” you receive should tell you to run “python Control.py start showing”, which should show the widget bar (although see Emil’s question and answer above if there are no widgets in it). I repeat, though, that this code is not destined for users, it’s destined for hackers who want a leg up in building a Dashboard-a-like for Linux.
10 days later
Nice! I have downloaded the code and will try it today. Any chance of calling the widgets .. “jacklets”?? :)
2 weeks later
Just a note that, though your code checks for minor >= 40 and minor
2 weeks later
Hmm… your comments thing seems to have truncated my message. :\
Well, let’s try again (the short version this time): Your code uses features that don’t seem to have been implimented prior to dbus version 0.42. Thus, it doesn’t work on Fedora Core 4, which ships with 0.40. You can save yourself some support posts by changing your version check accordingly.
Looks really cool, though. I’ll either update dbus or just wait for FC5 but one way or another I will definitely play with it soon.
2 weeks later
Brad: I believe you. The issue is that the dbus chaps break the API every time they release a new version, because it’s unstable. It was very difficult to get an answer when I asked questions like “which version of dbus should I support” and “how do I do thing X in version Y of dbus”, because the answer was almost always “run the most recent version”. So I guessed a bit, and made it work with the dbus that I had installed on my version of Ubuntu.
2 weeks later
wow! that certainly looks awesome man.
11 weeks later
[...] I’ve signed up to do a lightning talk at Guadec on Jackfield. That’s scaring me a bit, that. [...]
19 weeks later
You should see if the gnome project would be interrested in taking care of it (looks like something they might like)
21 weeks later
It looks brilliant. However it won’t run with Dapper’s dbus (I tried changing it to allow dbus 0.50, but it caused an error.
BTW is there a SVN repo or similar? (I’m guessing a lot of work has gone into this for Guadec)
22 weeks later
[...] Ein Apple ähnliches Dashboard für Linux findet ihr hier. [...]
23 weeks later
Wow. Amazing stuff. This what I am searching for a long time!(compiz.net-thread about).
But i have the same problem with dapper:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “Control.py”, line 7, in ?
import jackfield_dbus
File “/jackfield/jackfield/jackfield_dbus.py”, line 56, in ?
raise NotImplementedError(”DBus 0.50 untested!”)
NotImplementedError: DBus 0.50 untested!
23 weeks later
If you’re having dapper dbus errors, please use the svn version, which should have fixed this…
23 weeks later
same problem here on Etch. Even with SVN-Version.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “jackfield/Control.py”, line 7, in ?
import jackfield_dbus
File “/home/jabba/apps/jackfield/jackfield/jackfield_dbus.py”, line 56, in ?
raise NotImplementedError(”D-Bus “+dbus.version+” untested!”)
TypeError: cannot concatenate ’str’ and ‘tuple’ objects
Package “python2.4-dbus” installed.
55 weeks later
WOW. Thank you so much. Please continue to improve and work on this. This project is very much valued!
61 weeks later
[...] So wie’s aussieht, hat tatsächlich doch jemand was ähnliches wie Apple’s Dashboard für den Gnome Desktop programmiert. Es heisst Jackfield und ist definitiv etwas, das ich ausprobieren werde, wenn ich Zeit dazu habe. [...]
71 weeks later
[...] For Linux, you must have installed Jackfield [...]
119 weeks later
[...] podemos ancontrar una infinidad en Gnome-Look, o bien existe la opción de Dashboard en el sitio de Jackfield. Screenlets lo puedes descargar para la versión de Ubuntu que tengas en: [...]
123 weeks later