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!

Over that weekend (the anniversary of which is this weekend), I had more than 1 download a minute, and the widget received over 12,000 downloads before I stopped counting. This was my 15 mins of fame :-)

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.

As I write, my widget is the ‘featured widget’ on Apple’s website!

Over 2000 downloads so far, and yesterday after it became ‘Featured Widget’, it was downloaded more than once a minute on average! This is cool… if only I was receiving micro-payments :-)

For some reason News Cloud didn’t appear in Apple’s download chart (it doesn’t look like it got updated), but hopefully my widget will make an appearance shortly – I’ll need that for ongoing publicity.

Good fun, and motivates me to complete my second widget.

My widget got published on Apple’s site!

Hoping it gets downloaded, and maybe, just maybe in to the charts! :-)

I’ve had a lot of spare time and have written a couple of widgets that I think are cool.

One is pretty well complete and the other is still work in progress, but quite advanced.

It’s possible to endlessly tweak, but I need to publish sooner or later.

I’m hoping to break into Apple’s top 50 downloaded widgets.

The widgets are intended as a bit of fun, but folk may just decide they are silly/useless. Now I finally have broadband access, I’m looking forward to finding out.

My widget (as outlined in previous entry) is really coming along. All the pieces are in place, though there are still quite a few glitches to fix – all requiring more debugging and more learning.

However, it’s going well and I’m learning a lot.