The Flip Side 10.30.2006

The podcast episode is about various widgets. The first widget discussed is the Delivery Status Widget, which allows users to track the status of their online orders. The CSS Cheat Sheet Widget is also mentioned, which provides CSS code markup for widget and website development. The Dash Quit Widget allows users to quit their dashboard and free up RAM. The Google Calendar Widget is highlighted, which allows users to keep track of events on their desktop. The possibility of a new widget called Widget Kit is mentioned, along with the website WidgetTop.com, which allows users to run dashboard widgets on their browser. Halloween-themed widgets are also discussed. The episode ends with a debate on who invented the widget, with various companies claiming credit. The B-Ruler widget is mentioned as a simple widget. Monday, October 30th, 2006, episode 23, Welcome to the Flipside with John Brown. Hi, and welcome to the Flipside. I'm John Brown, your host, and this is the podcast all about widgets. For developers and widget enthusiasts, I'd like to thank you all for staying subscribed and downloading. And a welcome to all newly subscribed people. Thank you for joining us today. We have a lot to cover and a lot to go through, so let's just jump right in. The first widget I want to talk about today is called the Delivery Status Widget. You can find this over at Apple's website or at their own website. There'll be a link to it in the show notes. If you can't wait for your online order, there's no need to check the site constantly anymore. Just load up the widget and enter your number and the status will automatically update for you. Now, this widget was really great. Originally, it only worked with Apple.com, but now it works with Apple.com, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.jp, Amazon.de, Amazon.at, and Amazon.fr, as well as FedEx, UPS, USPS, and DHL within the United States only. So again, really great widget. Check it out. There's a link in the show notes. Terrific. The next widget that caught our eye over here was the CSS Cheat Sheet Widget. Now, what makes this widget so great is that we all need to be using CSS to be making our widgets anyway, and for a lot of us, we're also widget developers and website developers, and so we use CSS on a daily basis. This CSS Cheat Sheet Widget allows you to see the CSS code markup that you need, and then it allows you to copy and paste that into your code. Again, really simple, and there's a link in the show notes. The next widget is called the Dash Quit Widget. Now, I bet you can guess what this does. It allows you to quit your dashboard, but before it allows you to do that, it also will display exactly how much RAM your dashboard is taking up. So if your dashboard is really taking up that much RAM, there's not really any need to quit it, but if it is taking up quite a bit of RAM, you can go ahead and shut down the dashboard and free up that extra RAM for those applications that you need to use it for. So again, Dash Quit Widget, really simple. You can find it in the show notes. The next widget I want to talk about today is the Google Calendar Widget. Now, this widget wasn't created by Google, but it has the same look and feel as the other Google widgets that you would find on Google's website. You can keep an eye on today's events on the desktop with this Dash Quit Widget. You don't need to log into Google Calendar. It is a dedicated browser window clicking on an event takes you directly to the event in Google Calendar ready for you to edit. So you can edit right within the widget. You can add new events right within the widget. Again, really cool, really powerful, and very well designed. The next thing I want to talk about today was a very kind of interesting thing. I stumbled upon this via an offer at Max Zod. If you don't know or if you're not familiar with Max Zod, it's a really great website that allows you to buy cheap discounted Mac software. And I just recently bought the application Disco, which is an application that allows you to burn CDs and DVDs with really cool visual effects. Now, when I clicked on the Disco website, there was a link off to the side for an icon creator, icon artist called Jasper Hauser. Now, Jasper Hauser has many icons, and I was just looking through his portfolio of icons, and there was one icon that caught my eye, and it was an icon for an application called Widget Kit. Now, Widget Kit hasn't been released yet, and it's just pure speculation. If you go to Jasper Hauser's website, you will see an icon that he created. It's called Widget Kit, and it looks like it's being made by Neometrics Software, and it's under the umbrella of the other great apps out there like AppZapper and the newly created Disco. So there's not any information on Neometrics' website, but again, if they come up with this really great application, then this is going to blow DashCode. It's going to blow WCode and all those others right out of the water. It's going to be visually stunning and amazing, and I can't wait to see it. Although, when Library comes out, it will be having the full version of DashCode and also Widgetarium, a great widget development tool that I use, and I encourage anyone else to try. There will be a link to all those and Jasper Hauser's website, so you can see the icon that he made for the newly created Widget Kit. The next thing I want to talk about, I kind of alluded to this on the last show, but now it's kind of up and running in full swing. The service over at WidgetTop.com. If you go to WidgetTop.com, W-I-D-G-E-T-O-P.com, it's a really great site that allows you to run dashboard widgets right in your browser. Ever wanted to show your PC friends what you're working on and what your dashboard widgets look like? Well, now you can, because even on a PC, you can run dashboard widgets through any Firefox browser. It's a really great service and they will automatically convert your widgets for you. All you have to do is become a developer, get a username and password, it's free, and then you can automatically upload your dashboard widgets and then they will tell you how to convert them for the web. Most times, no conversion is necessary and it works 100% out of the box. So again, WidgetTop.com, really great website. Show your friends what you're working on in the dashboard, even on the PC. The next thing I wanted to kind of talk about today is obviously we're getting close to Halloween, it's tomorrow, and so for a lot of us, we really want to use our dashboard as sort of a festive place, a place for decorating our OS X so that we can, you know, see a few little scary things and hide them real quick, who knows? But Halloween is here and there are quite a few widgets out there to celebrate Halloween and keep your Mac nice and festive. The Halloween countdown widget is a great widget that lets you count down to Halloween as well as change the appearance of cleverly designed pumpkin interface so the pumpkin has a glowing sort of flash animation behind it. It's pretty interesting. Again, you probably want to use this before Halloween, but again, it's a really cool decoration also. It is a pumpkin, a jack-o'-lantern rather. There's another smaller version of this widget which shows you the numbers more prominently in the countdown and it's also called the Halloween countdown widget. The Gothtober widget is a fun widget that gives you tips and information with each day that approaches closer to Halloween and no dashboard would be complete this holiday season without the skull and bones widget that looks very nice and adds a spooky touch. Now, this widget is really just an image only, but it's done very well and it doesn't really take up any system resources, so check it out. The last widget I recommend is the random Halloween costume generator. It looks like a cool widget, however, I have not been able to download it, which is kind of odd. It's a number two slot for the top 50 widgets and it's also on the front page of Apple's dashboard downloads site and every time I click on the download link, I get a page that says forbidden. If anyone knows how to get around this and get this great widget, let me know. I haven't been able to download it, but I've been hearing nothing but good things about it, so obviously other people are able to download this widget. And again, the link to all of those will be in the show notes and you can find those over at www.widgetshow.com. All right, the last thing I kind of wanted to talk about was the debate that we've been going over and over and over since the beginning of dashboard and confabulator, but who invented the widget? Now, there's been a lot of speculation between different people. We found a really informative site online that talks about the creation of widgets. Confabulator co-founder Arlo Rose claims to have invented the widget, but the concept emerged years before confabulator shipped. Some claim Apple invented the widget that companies' desk accessories conceived in 1981 that came bundled with the 1984 version of Mac OS. Now, these desk accessories included clocks and calculators, for instance, but the desk accessories feature doesn't count as a real widget engine because desk accessories couldn't stream information from the internet and wasn't end user created or shared. So, that's really the defining properties and characteristics of a widget. The whole widget craze was predicted by the CEO of the company that invented it in June 1996, years before the current boom of widget engines emerged. The CEO is quoted by Dow Jones International News as saying, the future of computing will revolve around these small internet-connected applications that will live on the desktop, blurring the distinction between individual PCs and network and internet servers. That CEO was none other than Bill Gates, and the company was, of course, Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft introduced the Active Desktop as part of the 1997 release of Windows Desktop Update, which was an optional component of the Internet Explorer 4.0 browser at the time. Microsoft's many applets were called widgets, but Active Desktop Items, Microsoft and other companies offered a download site for items they created, including weather widgets, news updates, financial info, and comic strip of the day. So, again, to our shock and horror, the site that created these first Active Widgets is still available and online today. So, again, a little bit of information that we might otherwise have glossed over, but again, just shows the collaboration and the stealing of ideas between the two great internet companies out there today. The last widget I want to talk about today is the B-Ruler widget. You can find this over at www.bwidget.com. This is the simplest widget that I've ever seen, but it's one of the most amazing, and I use it on a daily basis, especially since I do a lot with photography and graphic design and web design on my iBook. It is one of the simplest widgets, as I said before, and it's one of the most powerful. Over at B-Widgets, they're making simple and functional widgets that do a function and do it well. This innovation is not, however, new to us Mac fans, and we love it. We thrive on it. We expect it from our developers, and so we are very appreciative when we see it. The B-Ruler is a widget that lives up to all of our expectations. It is a simple widget that can measure in horizontal and vertical scale. So, one button will flip the ruler horizontally or vertically. You can stretch the widget as much as you want. You can stretch it from the edge of your screen to the other end of your screen. You can move it off screen and continue stretching it. It's really great. It's simple. It does exactly what it says. Again, it's the B-Ruler widget. All right. So, this is the show all about widget developing and for widget enthusiasts. However, we haven't really been doing a whole lot when it comes to creating widgets or tutorials for widget developers. Now, I wanted to let you all know that over on our show blog found at widgetshow.com, you will notice that there are several really great tutorials that we've already written and we've already mentioned on past shows, but I thought that it would be fitting to refresh everyone who might not be familiar with the site and go over some tutorials that we have over on our website. We have a widget alert system tutorial and what this is, is it's a system that was created by Taco Widgets that allows you to put error dialogue messages or alert messages in your widget. So, if you ever wanted to add an alert message in the form of a pop-up window, this window looks and feels just like the dashboard environment. So, again, you can check that out. You'll find all these tutorials right on the main page at the top on the right hand side of widgetshow.com. The next one is the HTTP request PHP tutorial and what this allows you to do is grab any information from any website and throw it into a widget. The next tutorial is called the auto-update your widget and what this will do is when a new version of your widget is released, it will automatically tell everyone who has an older version of your widget in their dashboard that there is a new one available for download. The widget.system tutorial allows you to access any command line utility in your widget. So, for example, you can control the sound, you can open applications, you can do many interesting things including having text spoken to you right from within the widget. This is a basic tutorial and we will be looking to come up with more advanced ones in the future. We have a widget localization tutorial which allows you to add different languages to your widget. The JavaScript arrays tutorial which allows you to add different cool JavaScript information to your widget and also the multiple RSS feed tutorial which if you're making an RSS widget and you want to have a multiple drop down selector and toggle between RSS feeds, this is a really great tutorial for you. So, again, those are the tutorials making this more of a developer podcast. We will be returning to our roots. The first three or four episodes that we came out with, episode one, two, three, and four, were kind of terrible quality and but the information was really good and so what we're going to do is we're going to go over the information that we talked about in the first four episodes and we're going to bring it more in a presentable fashion and we're going to break it up into step-by-step tutorials, how to create a dashboard widget from scratch without using any proprietary software like Widgetarium or WCode or even Dashcode. So, yes, we can make dashboard widgets using just TextEdit and Photoshop and we'll learn how to do that so that we'll be more familiar with the code and as we get better then we'll be able to get away from that and you'll be able to use these other great tools and actually understand what the tools are doing for you so that you don't have to do it yourself. Alright, so that was it today. A really short and sweet show. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have a widget that you would like to submit for review, if you're a widget developer or designer and you've developed something really cool, tell us about it. Even if you're not a designer or developer, if you've made a great widget, the best way to announce it is to tell us about it and we can share it on the show. You can contribute to the show in many different ways. You can review any of the products that we've reviewed here on the show. You can send your reviews to widgetshow at gmail.com. We also have a hotline. It's at 206-333-0417. One more time, that's 206-333-0417 and please send your audio comments to widgetshow at gmail.com. We'll greatly appreciate any questions and feedback that you guys send to us. We're also looking for staff writers so if you want to write something for our show blog, just let us know. Send us a copy of what you want published and we'll throw it right on the blog for you with the proper credit links and everything. Again, you can send those to widgetshow at gmail.com and of course, be a part of active user discussions over at the forum. Go to forum.widgetshow.com and you can talk about everything dashboard and widget related and also get help and guidance from other widget developers out there. I wanted to let you guys know in advance I'm going to be moving back to my hometown. I am currently out here in Taiwan. I've been an English teacher out here for one year now and I'm going to be returning back home and starting to get back into the groove in the United States and of course, as soon as I get back home, there's going to be tons of holidays and whatnot. So if you don't hear from the show, please stay subscribed. We are not going away. I just want to let you know that I'll be in a transitional phase for a few weeks, but of course, I am going to be right here with you to make this great podcast and continue to grow this great community. So I want to thank you all for downloading and listening one more time and have a happy and safe Halloween. I will catch you all next time on the flip side.