Talk:GUI Widget

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 Fliptych?
2 Origin of the word Widget
3 Origin of the word Widget
4 Wikipedia widget for Mac 10.4. users
5 Progress bars
6 Checkbox is a type of button?
7 Merged

[edit] Fliptych?

Is fliptych too unestablished to be added to this list? If not, it should be added here and at the category level.Ben Morrison

[edit] Origin of the word Widget

Does anyone know anything about the origins of the word Widget? I have seen the term 'wisket' meaning a gadget used in a note about turning lathes. This was in the MS notebooks of Simon Goodrich, mechanician to the [British] Navy Board at the beginning of the C19. I think its London area technical slang Apwoolrich 19:49, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It's a contraction of "window gadget", AFAIK.

That's what I thought, too, but the article cites an origin unrelated to GUI programming. Either the non-technical "widget" (the one that means "miscellaneous thingamajig") is related to the GUI-widget, and therefore the GUI-widget is not a contraction of "window gadget," or the two words are only coincidentally related and the current explanation should be taken out of this article. 166.89.65.118 16:31, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Origin of the word Widget

The link below says the word Widget comes from the 1924 play "Beggar on Horseback", by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly.

http://www.yaelf.com/aueFAQ/mifwdgtntsbywllmcw.shtml

also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget

I remember "Widgets" being used as a generic nonsense name for an unspecified product in business classes. When talking about inventing, marketing, distributing, etc. "your product," in several classes and instructive videos they would call this fictional item a widget. I assume it was because it sounded like a real thing, but had the advantage of not actually existing. I'm going to try to find some documentation on this, but it could be hard finding something web-accessible since the modern usage is tech and so is the web. If anyone else wants to go ahead, I think the word is in need of disambiguation. Durty Willy 03:39, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
- Disregard my previous comment. Apparently, this was already disambiguated, but when I searched for "Widget" in March, the search engine loaded the Widget (computing) page by default instead of the disambiguation page (or any other page where "Widget" was mentioned). My above usage was clearly noted in the Placeholder name article. Slight tangent: I also forgot about the Widget (beer) useage, an interesting little device.Durty Willy 04:54, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia widget for Mac 10.4. users

Apple has a Wikipedia widget available for download from this link. You can look up articles without being on Wikipedia.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/wikipedia.html

[edit] Progress bars

Is there an article about progress bars in Wikipedia? I searched and found none.

If there is one, a link need to be added here. --tyomitch 20:15, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

Easy enough. >poof< Willy the Great has poofed up a link: Progress bar. A very recent article, which is a little suprising. Durty Willy 03:23, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Checkbox is a type of button?

Is there any argument for the categorization of a checkbox as a button? It allows selection between two choices (selection) and does not trigger an action (which buttons do). - Mpnolan 00:55, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Technically a checkbox is (at least on Microsoft Windows just a button with BS_CHECKBOX. Here is a list of window styles that can be used on button windows. Some applications do trigger things when you tick a box - there's no particular reason why they can't, other than convention.

Whether this means that they should be categorized the same is another question, but that's probably the reason that they were to start with. If they are, probably radio buttons should be as well, as they are similar. GreenReaper 01:47, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

In the technical area, Qt's QCheckbox class inherits the virtual QButton class. This, however, is purely for programming reasons and doesn't reflect the user conception of the widget. The confusion here mainly stems from the existence of both a PushButton (that looks and feel like a physical button) and a Button (which may be a PushButton, Checkbox and others). This terminology is alien to most end-users, though. This should be noted in the Button article, but not here. --logixoul 09:26, 3 August 2006 (UTC)