Write a dashboard widget

Now that I am the editor of a fast growing magazine, you would think that was more than enough to take on board…no, not only do I have 10 Blogs, 2 websites the size of Disneyland but am also an active member of at least 4 online groups AND, let’s not forget I am also a publsihed author of 5 books, with 2 more on their way! Did i mention i am also married with children???

How on earth will I cope tutoring students the art of essay writing?? I fly by he seat of my pants and usually get all jobs done…those that are yet to be completed, will do all in good time!

I wrote my first and only widget last december. It searches google and gives you results right in dashboard.

You can download it here: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23380

Inspired by the trip to Macworld, I creted a widget to countdown to the release of the iPhone, using the beta version of Dashcode, and even set it up to key off a published calendar so I could update it once we finally knew the release date. I even created a little how-to video on my video blog HowTube:
http://howtube.com/index.php?post_id=173898

It was nice, a little bit too hard to do, but definitely worth doing it when you see the end result :)
Now, i want to write another one, a much more difficult one !!

My first dashboard widget is functional, but not yet pretty. I set out to write a widget that looks up words from the official scrabble dictionary. I’ll probably add some quizzing functions like “find all anagrams of blah” in the future. This was a good way to learn javascript better.

I wrote a pretty Google search widget. Unfortunatly, I can’t release it in its current form as it uses the Google logo (which I don’t have permission to use). Also, Apple included a Google search widget in their 10.4.4 release making my widget less needed. Anyhow, it was a good learning experience. I’d like to write something more sophisticated later on when I get a good idea.

Try using Wcode, I think the final version is coming out soon.

http://www.widgetfactor.com

Well, many of the widget ideas seem to be inspired by Sherlock. Frankly, I wonder why Sherlock is even around anymore except for the fact that Apple didn’t get to recreating all the popular Sherlock channels into widgets yet. But I always felt Sherlock somehow got lost in the shuffle of it all. Ask any new Mac user if they use Sherlock and most of the time you’ll get a “What’s Sherlock?”.

Hey why not a widget for 43 things? Heck, any 37signals application is great for this kinda thing.

not a very original one but a good obvious one. An eBay tracker widget. I’m not talking about those lame widgets with a text field that brings up ebay with your search term in it. I mean the real deal.