iCraig » Dashboard

LiveWidget 2.0

craig — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 10:55:32 +0000

It’s been available else where for a few weeks now so I guess I should mention LiveWidget 2.0 on my own blog. LiveWidget is a client for the LiveJournal weblog site that runs in Apple’s Dashboard (part of OS X 10.4). It’s much the same as before of course, no major rewrite here, but there are some new features that make it worth the download.

Userpics: Log in and you’ll get a list of all your uploaded userpics
Tags: add tags to your entries to help sort them later
Secure Passwords: using a plugin by Benjamin Swanson to store passwords in the OS X Keychain

I hope people out there enjoy it, drop me line if you have any ideas for improvements.

Update: A problem has been found and fixed under OS X 10.4.3 so if you have LiveWidget 2.0 you should update to 2.1

LiveWidget 2.1

RecentWidgets 1.1

craig — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 11:00:28 +0000

I’ve just published the latest revision of RecentWidgets. Incase you hadn’t heard of it before I had better tell you what it does and why you can’t live without it. It’s an RSS feed watcher. And the particular feeds it watches come from the following widget download sites:

So there you have it, and easy way to find the most recent widgets. It’s now at version 1.1 incorporating a fix that made it disappear when using the links on the back.

And in case you’re wondering, this was the original one, if you see something very much like it, the chances are that they copied it from my source code, and I use HowToCreate.co.uk to get the RSS stuff going. I’ve come across a couple of cases where they copied every file in the NZMac.com widget and forgot to change the info files, so it still claimed to be ours in the Process Viewer. Not cool.

LiveWidget goes 1.0

craig — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 10:21:47 +0000

It’s about time that LiveWidget went 1.0, so I’ve released it to Apple.com, VersionTracker and a few more widget-only sites. Until now it has only been available from the excellent DashboardWidgets.com site, but since it’s almost what I originally aimed for I want to get it to a wider audience and see what they think.
Of course there are more things I want to do with it, including support for user icons and the new tagging feature, but I’m getting busy at work and it’ll be a few weeks before I can get to them.

So what can it do? Well it uses the XML-RPC method of communication to talk to the LiveJournal server. This means it gets to encrypt your password twice before sending it across the internet, it can discover the custom friends-groups you’ve set up and the shared journals you can post to. It’ll even inform you if you’re posting to a moderated journal and your message is in the queue to be approved. I’m pretty proud of it. And so is Josh Allen, he did the graphics.

Widgets widgets everywhere

craig — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 09:23:09 +0000

It’s never a good sign when a site is left for as long as this one has been ‘in progress’, but I have been busy. Among the number of projects and distractions I have been dealing with is a new technology (or rather a new use of existing technology) by Apple. The Dashboard is part of OS X 10.4 (usually called Tiger) and serves as a host to small programs called Widgets.
They are mostly made with web technology, Javascript, HTML and CSS are the three main components, but they can also use plugins written in other languages but I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’ve been involved with three widgets so far, but have been dismayed to find my work turning up in other ones that haven’t had the decency to mention that the work they are touting as their own, actually comes from me. That really pisses me off. The worst was a guy called Rik, who when confronted with the fact that the code he pushed as his was entirely copied from the NZMac.com widget I helped write only responded with

“jep, because there was nobody who wanted to help me… (that’s why I borrowed some codes of you ) “

grrrrr

Anyway, as I mentioned above I have had a hand in three widgets. NZMac.com had some RSS feed code from a tutorial online, and had turned this into a working widget, but it needed finishing. I got it auto refreshing, saving preferences, and reporting its status. This is the one that got copied by SmallApple.com who gave us three developers credit, and then we got copied by that Rik character and not even mentioned. Craigslist was written in one day for a guy setting up a design company. He needed some way to get the name out there and since Craigslist.com is so popular he thought he’d use that as a vehicle. I even got paid of it which was useful. But the one I am most proud of, the one I did for myself is LiveWidget (Josh Allen did the widget graphics). It’s a client for LiveJournal, the super popular blog site. A few LJ widgets came out, but my one seems to have taken the lead for the moment, because it uses the XML-RPC interface and is capable of getting information back from the server rather than just posting to it. It can handle the normal stuff like Music and Mood, and then goes onto post to the user’s own “friend groups” and can even post to moderated communites. I’ll be adding User Icons soon, and I’m waiting on user requests to see where else I can take it.
I’ve got a few more ideas to put into code, but while I’m dealing with other things development is back in slow mode. Stay tuned though, the website is high on my ToDo list.