Skip to toolbar

Community & Business Groups

Widget URI in iOS

I asked a friend, Jimmy Ti, if he could make a rough prototype showing if it was possible to implement the Widget URI scheme in iOS. The critical bit I wanted to see working was faking HTTP responses. Here is what he came up with:

https://github.com/marcoscaceres/widget-URI-iOS-

It’s an Xcode project that reuses some sample code provided by Apple for Mac OS X, which Jimmy retrofitted to work on iOS. The app is very simple: it contains a WebView that loads a HTML file named “test.html”, the web page has a few tags and AJAX image loading that loads from “widget://”.

The app implements the widget:// scheme to return the images from local resources (the images are actually generated dynamically from the code, but it could very well be loaded locally).

If you have Xcode installed, you can simply open up the .xcodeproj file, and “Build and Run” the code on iPhone simulator. Works a treat! Huge thanks to Jimmy Ti for taking the time to do this! It’s a great proof of concept.

Ideally, next would be:

  • Write the code to support other content types: generated images are cool, but not quite what we are trying to achieve right now 🙂
  • Make widget:// the document’s location so that everything can be resolved relatively to the start file.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Before you comment here, note that this forum is moderated and your IP address is sent to Akismet, the plugin we use to mitigate spam comments.

*