this is what i was thinking about. i think the whole flash widgets concept is a bit too restrictive.

At this point, we will only be supporting widget implemented in Flash from our site.

There's no assurance that all future chumbys will be running the same operating system, the same processor, or the same hardware configuration (screen size, etc).  Flash delivers a level of platform independence, as well as eliminating issues of size.  For instance, the bulk of our current widgets are under 30K, some as small as 2K.

Also, Flash movies encapsulate everything the widget needs - images, text, fonts, audio - into a single, compressed file, and the entire thing can run from memory alone, which allows a completely clean runtime environment for the next widget.  Flash also has excellent backward compatibility - Flash 3, 4 and 5 movies will play just fine on Flash 9.  All this, in a single 1MB executable.

We have provided an SDK for folks that want to create their own executables, however, at the moment it is unlikely that will be deploying them as part of our service.

This is, of course, subject to change.

We considered the approach of making a web browser the primary layer.

There were many issues with that.

1) A browser that is compatible with a reasonable fraction of sites would be large. You'd need to fully support all the variants of HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.

2) Many popular websites are very rich in content - they require plugins such as Java, Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media etc to give a good experience.  Many of those technologies aren't available for ARM, and those that are require a lot of licensing.

3) Most websites would be unusable on such a small display, and with only a touchscreen for input.

4) We're not building an interactive computer.

There are many vendors that sell devices that run browsers.

But fundamentally, we're trying to make something *different*, not something you already have just in different packaging.

...so why not make a prettier, animated widget in Flash if you're going to the trouble anyway.  It will look better, act better, be smaller, and be able to take advantage of the functionality that the chumby provides.

Most of the widgets are designed to be viewed from 4 to 5 feet away - it's not about scrolling pages of 10pt text.

Nothing stops you from writing a Flash app that fetches content dynamically from your site and autoscrolls it. In fact several sites around the world do just that.

Yeah, I've never much liked Flash myself. When it was introduced all those Flash intros started poping up, and to use it they want you to buy this big bulky program. I've always prefered mixing HTML, Javascript and Perl for web design, plus Java if necessary. But seeing as I just got Flash with the Macromedia Studio pack thingie for my easy A web design class, I guess I'll look into it.
But as for web browsing, I think that offering a full web browser would be too much of a pain, and widgets would be great for most all purposes. Mmm...Hack A Day without the computer...

Why not go with a java implementation then? This would give developers the flexibility of a fully functional programming language, while still providing you with the ability to change any part of the chumby.

I mean some of us, like myself, might have a low level hack in mind which requires system level software be written and some hardware modification as well.