I’ve been testing, prototyping a WebKit based widget engine. This will totally halt my Ashlar Project.

I’ve been using the QT based port to build the engine. The results are quite good. I could build widgets easily with plain HTML and Javascript. The prototype could even host some Dashboard basic widgets.

I am not quite impressed though with QT’s graphics engine. It’s a lot inferior with Apple’s CoreGraphics. It uses native Win32 Font rendering instead of Freetype. SVG is available but the graphics isn’t eye candy.

I’m now trying to build using CoreGraphics (which was the default anyway). But I would later on test Cairo as the graphics backend. Using CoreGraphics means my engine which is be free and opensource, would have to be shipped with Safari binaries. Nobody would want that.

Would probably release a beta of the engine by the end of the month. In the meantime, what would be a good name? Konfabulator sounds nice but it’s taken already :)