14 DAY TRIAL // The dashboard is an application designed to host mini applications known as widgets that became available for the first time in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger". The dashboard is a semi transparent layer that appears when it's activated by a hotkey previously chosen by the user. The widgets are much older than the dashboard, since the term was first applied to user interface elements during Project Athena, back in the 1980s. In the meantime, they became a daily presence on the Web and on most computers, no matter if it's about Macs or PCs.
Today, Mesa Dynamics announced the official launch of the freeware application Amnesty Generator 1.0, a utility for Mac OS X that was designed to convert Web widgets, videos, gadgets and badges into dashboard widgets.
The difference between Web and desktop widgets is that while the last ones are built to work independently on a user's computer, sometimes even without the need of an Internet connection, Web widgets are packaged in HTML code snippets designed for use in homepages, blogs and social networking profile pages. Obviously, most of them are games, but embeddable video and other various gadgets are also an ubiquitous presence on the Internet.
Mesa Dynamics' Amnesty Generator is able to convert Web widget code directly into dashboard widgets, so you get the chance to run web content natively on your Mac OS X's dashboard without the need for a hosted page! To simplify the conversion, this application includes an "Autofill" feature and detailed instructions, with extended support for over 30 websites, including PicGames, YouTube and Google Gadgets.
The funny part about this entire business is that you can use Amnesty Generator 1.0 on Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above, but the widgets generated can't be used on this version of the operating system, because there's no dashboard available! At last, you shouldn't worry if you're a Mactel user, because today's widget converter comes as a Universal Binary, so everyone can enjoy it.