Are you one of those who assumed that Mac OS X Dashboard widgets will be on your iPhone since it is running on Mac OS X too only to be shocked that the only widgets available were three basic widgets.
No problem, Erica Sudan over at Tuaw seems to have (almost) figured out how to get the Mac OS X Dashboard widgets on the iPhone.
Erica seems to have almost figured out how to get the Mac OS X Dashboard widgets on to the iPhone thanks to her latest iPhone hack. The reason for using 'almost' is because she has managed to get the Weather, ESPN and Calendar widgets to work very well with the hack. However, the Flight Tracker, Dictionary and Phone Book widgets aren't working well.
Please don't confuse this to some of the websites who are claiming to offer widgets for the iPhone, those are essentially Safari-based widgets where you need go a particular website which need three clicks from the home screen -- Web, Bookmarks, bookmark name. We are talking about native widgets here; which are small applications and are launched from the iPhone application menu.
iPhone native widgets store resource files such as images, HTML, CSS in the iPhone's local storage and pull data updates such as stock prices or the latest weather report from a remote server.
Safari-based applications request each resource from a remote server and poll for cache updates with each page load. So assuming your weekly weather display contains a sun, cloud, and cloud with rain your application might poll a remote server for possible changes to each of the three images with every display of your weather page.
If you want to try out this hack to Mac OS X Dashboard widgets, below are the steps courtesy Erica:
- Download a copy of Widgets.app from this link.
- You must install System/Library/WidgetResources from your Mac onto the iPhone. Same folder, same name, same contents. Most Widgets will not run properly without these support files.
- Install your widgets into /var/root/Library/Widgets on the iPhone. Widgets.app runs plain old ordinary OS X widgets. You must copy over the entire file structure, so scp -r YourWidget.wdgt root@youriphoneip:/var/root/Library/Widgets is going to be your best bet. And yes, you need to create the Widgets folder if it does not yet exist.
So folks enjoy the native Mac OS X Dashboard widgets and do let me know how well it works in the comments below.
Erica as always thanks for making this possible.
The screenshot of the ESPN widget on your iPhone below:
I found this video was the easiest for helping to get the most apps for your iPhone. WonderHowTo get's it done. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yETCLqtSVCg
This is awesome, but I just gotta bet this is coming down the pipe from Apple eventually anyway.
will this allow me to use the Cheap Gas widget? I think we all need this when driving around.