ideal widget dev environment?

[tortoise]

Hello,

I am brand new to OSX (but not development). I am finding widgets interesting and have decided to play with them for the time being then do some Cocoa stuff.

But widget development is fairly tedious. I have a text editor, and I edit the html, css, etc and plist files by hand, then to test them in the Dashboard I need to copy the directory, manually append the wdgt extension, install it in Dashboard, test it out, then uninstall it.

Surely there is a better way? Is there a plugin or something for XCode that makes widget development relatively seemless? Or perhaps some other IDE?

How is everyone here handling their widget development needs?

[Taxxodium]

What I do is make a folder and add the required files to it (Info.plist, .html, .css and .js files). The I add the wdgt extension and control click it and pick the Show Package Contents menuitem. This will open a new window with contents of the widget which I leave open during the development of the widget.

As for tools, I use TextWrangler for editing since it's free and simple to use, Xcode when I need to make a plugin and for graphics the Illustrator/Photoshop combination is the best so far.

To test the widget, I usually leave the Console app running to see my alert() messages and debug the widget.

[tortoise]

Seems like we are in need of a nice widget IDE of some sort. I'm sure several are in the works as I type this. Some sort of plugin to do widget projects in XCode seems ideal to me. Granted, I know almost nothing about XCode at this point so that wish might not even make sense.

[Tim_]

There is an app called WCode... its for making widgets, but the guy who made it charges $15 for it, and i doubt it's really worth it.

Link: http://www.widgetfactor.com/

[Zanathel]

Well, I'd say TextEdit (the text editor that comes with Mac OS X). As widget "programming" only involves javascript and HTML, no advanced editor is required - especially not an application for $15! :)

[Zanathel]

TextEdit - it's one plist and a few HTML/Javascript-documents!

[olof]

Hello,

I write my first widget with Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) and Aptana plug-in (http://www.aptana.com/).

Your widget (.wdgt) is a folder so Eclipse see it as a folder. And Aptana is a nice html, css and javascript editor !