idgetsWay

Patrick April 19th, 2007

Evidence of new uses for widgets, AwkwardTV has released a plug-in for the Apple TV that allows users to install other plug-ins. Once this master plug-in–called Awkward TV Loader–is installed, users can browse and install Awkward TV plug-ins directly from the Apple TV user interface over the Internet. So while the installation of Loader is likely a hack that requires at least a baseline technical knowledge, the discovery and consumption of other plug-ins is quite simple and user-friendly indeed.

Many of the plug-ins are utility applications for managing Apple TV and QuickTime, like the ability to wake other computers via the local area network. Others still are really geeky, like Perlbin, which allows you to run Perl scripts. But several of the plugins might better be called widgets. These include file browser, RSS reader, weather forecast and sports scores. I’m not yet a beta tester (though I’m signing up), so I can’t yet report on how easy or hard it is to install the Loader, or on the actual use of these widgets.

But I can absolutely see a market for these widgets, paricularly a few that make sense in the home media environment. Weather is a perfect example. While listening to my iTunes library over my home entertainment center via Apple TV, I might want to know tomorrow’s weather. Rather than waiting for my local forecast to appear on The Weather Channel, and rather than firing up my home computer to visit Weather.com, I could simply activate the weather widget on the Apple TV.

Other use cases are easy to imagine: After browsing through our movie library on Apple TV and not liking our choices, my family uses Apple TV’s out-of-the-box functionality to view a few movie trailers. We pick one we like, and activate a Showtimes widget that lists our local theaters, movies and showtimes. Take this use case to its logical conclusion, and we should be able to buy tickets to the movie we want to see, right through the widget, courtesy of Fandango or another movie ticket purveyor.

It would not surprise me to see official Dashboard widgets for the Apple TV in the near future. In fact, I’m a bit surprise the company hasn’t provided them already, as it would seem to be a trivial software engineering feat via a simple software upgrade delivered over the Internet. They have already announced limited widget support for the iPhone, and both the iPhone and Apple TV run a modified version of Mac OS X. But Apple has its hands full with the upcoming releases of its iPhone and the desktop version Mac OS X, so it may be a simple matter of resource availability, product road mapping, or some other factors. In the meantime, you’ll have to be satisfied with the Awkward TV solution.

Whether Apple officially releases widgets for Apple TV or not, the bigger picture is the continuing proliferation of widgets into new uses, devices, media, and delivery methods such as Apple TV, Joost, Snap Shots, iPhone, S60 and so on. All manner of companies are realizing the power of allowing users to have greater control in defining their own personal digital experiences.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, tiles, Apple, Apple TV, Mac OS X, iPhone, AwkwardTV, Joost, Snap, Snap Shots, S60

• big picture
• Comments(1)