typewriting

Apple's Dashboard has a developer mode that lets you pull a widget off the Dashboard and onto the desktop, where it hovers over everything else, except another widget that has been selected more recently. It occurred to me today that somewhere Apple must be storing information about whether or not each widget is on the desktop, what layer each widget is on (relative to other widgets), the location of each widget, and more.

It doesn't take much more to make a window manager. If someone could figure out where this information is stored, and how to edit it, they could create a run time environment that allows widgets to be run as desktop applications. It seems inevitable to me that eventually the functionality of web applications will be build into the OS, but it would be neat to see someone give Apple a little push in that direction.

music.randomchaos.com is now being served from an iBook in my house, on a dynamic IP address at 7Mbps. This means everything on music.randomchaos.com will be slower, and occassionally it may go down altogether. In testing the system, I haven't noticed a big speed difference and it hasn't gone down once, but we'll see how it holds up under real traffic. On the positive side, I no longer have space limitations for the music, which means I can host as many songs as I want. It will also be easier to add new songs, as I can just stick them on my local iBook, and don't need to wait through slower FTP uploads. I hope this will result in my offering more music more often.