Apps, Extensions, Plug ins, Widgets, Oh My!

[Teallaura]

What the heck is the difference?

[mikewhitney]

Often an App (or application) should be a program which only needs the operating system to run on -- and provides a user interface and some desired functionality.

The term 'widget' has been used to describe a program which runs under some other application. Often there are programming features which make it easy for us teckkie people to quickly create a widget. Some of these widgets were able to be run and displayed as part of the windows desktop -- at least in past versions of Windows. An example widget could be for monitoring a stock and displaying it's current price dynamically on the Windows desktop.

The idea of plug-ins and extensions are applicable to existing programs which were designed to allow other people to add new features. So the Firefox browser can allow new types of documents to be viewed by used of a plug-in. We might imagine that someone wished to make a web page format which would generate 3D images viewable on 3D TV screens. This might be done with a plug-in.

The difference from a widget is that firefox has already provided most of the functionality (access to internet, display of web pages) whereas the environment used with widgets may not have any user-accessed functionality by itself.

You can see some more detail on extensions and add-ons here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...firefox-add-on


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[Teallaura]

Thanks!


So, what's the difference between an app and a program?

[mikewhitney]

I used 'program' to represent anything which was built based on code instructions which operate as sequential steps or as events (e.g., which might result from selecting an item on a list or when seeking to open a file) or under object oriented designs.

So an App is just one type of program. We also could speak of an operating system (such as Windows 10) as being a program. But it might be better to speak of Windows as a slew of programs whose original concept was to provide a bridge between Apps and the hardware of the computer. So we had the name DOS (Disk Operating System).

[Teallaura]

Got it!