There's been a lot of buzz around the new feature called "Dashboard" that will be introduced with "Tiger", the next generation MacOS X. Some are screaming foul as they believe it's a rip off of Konfabulator and some argue in greate lengths why it isn't. Others are concentrating on how this could help rapid development of simple desktop apps and how much good it'll do to the web standards that we have in place. I've been for the most part a huge proponent of the idea that in the future, developement of simple (and complex, depending on the requirements) desktop apps can move towards leveraging on the web standards put in place. I don't know if this is because I've been working with the web for over 10 years or because it is truly the best (meaning most widely available, not necessarily most architectural) way to be able to separate content, logic and presentation (I'll, of course, say it's the latter. ^^)

I can, with some bias, honestly say that being able to quickly whip up a user interface is unmatched using HTML and CSS. Don't get me wrong, since I do believe visual tools can do it faster, but I mean this in a programatic sense. Using a visual tool is orthogonal to the underlying technology as I can easily develop such a tool for the HTML & CSS world as well. If you compare writing code to put UI in front of you and writing HTML to do the same, I think HTML and CSS wins all the time. Yes, you can say that there exists other template-based tools out there intended for UI development that can do this faster, and you may be right, but I'm concentrating on being able to do this when you have real-world requirements such as being able to hire somebody right off the street to get down and dirty, or working with technology that has global momentum with a large community-based support, etc... I'm pretty certain that the amortized result will be in HTML and CSS's favor. If you believe otherwise, I'd love to discuss it. :)

So without going into too much detail, I'm pretty certain that a development platform that allows people to develop the frontend using standard web technologies is a big win for web-based application developers who'd like to be able to further their skillset into the desktop-realm. What's important, however, is that that there must exist good extensions that let you do what typical desktop application would be able to do outside the confines of web-vulnerability and security (like file system access, etc...). When I mean good I mean extensibility to create your own modules as well as standard interfaces that are platform-independent (of course it will be platform-dependent in the underlying implementation). I can only hope that however Apple intends to expose esternal services to the javascript environment that it doesn't end up being too cumbersome to get started.

It's worth noting the fact that Microsoft was first(at least in a semi-wide scale) in trying to bring this type of platform to the developers with their HTA effort. When I heard about the HTA framework back when it first came out, I was sold at the approach they were taking. Sure, there were flaws, missing features, etc... but anybody who knows Microsoft will know things don't really start to shine until the 4th version. ;) However, the problem is that Microsoft hasn't touched the HTA project since it has come out. Possibly the same reason why some believe they haven't touched IE 6 for almost 2 years. That's truly a shame, I thought they were really onto something. (I remember seeing some open source project trying to do similar things with the Gecko engine, but I can't find it)

So Dashboard is trying to do a very similar thing for MacOS X. I don't have any hands-on experience, so I can't comment on how good/bad it is, but I'm guessing it'll be pretty solid given that Apple sounds pretty serious about web technologies. I just wish the final product will allow developers to opt not to put their application in a layer that is normally invisible. But, you know what'd most kick ass for me? The ability to just write these web apps on any platform, compile it to a single file and to be able to run it on multiple platforms (even if it means having different binaries for the various platforms). That'd be really cool!