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Today we cover the basics of creating a countdown widget using dashcode. Lots of people have asked me how to create various widgets so this is part two in an eight part series on dashcode.
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Today we cover the basics of creating a countdown widget using dashcode. Lots of people have asked me how to create various widgets so this is part two in an eight part series on dashcode.
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The podcast episode discusses various widgets and their features. It mentions the LexInc widget, which offers a variety of content and different skins. The MacTactic widget helps track Mac releases and suggests the best time to sell your Mac. There is also a tutorial on using the dashboard in Mac OS X Tiger. The 3D IP Lookup Widget visualizes the geographical location of an IP address. Google has a page on converting Google Gadgets to run on different platforms. Widgetpedia.com is a website where you can find and add widgets. The episode also gives instructions on creating a countdown widget using DashCode. The host encourages listeners to contact the show with questions, reviews, and announcements. There is also information on a video tutorial for the countdown widget. February 14th, 2007, episode 26, Welcome to the Flipside with John Brown. Hi, this is John Brown and welcome to the Flipside. I'd like to extend a very warm and happy Valentine's Day to all of you out there who are listening and celebrating today and I hope that today is a very special day for you. In that regard, today is a very special day for us here on the podcast because today we are going to be going through the second part of the tutorial on Dash Code today, creating a countdown which is using Dash Code. So I hope you guys are all ready to learn because we've got that coming up a little later on. Now the first thing we have in Widget News is the LexInc company, go to LexInc.com. You can see that they have finally released version 1.0 of their LexInc widget. Now reading right from the website, offering a diversity of content from feeds such as American Entertainment, BBC Entertainment, Cinema Blend, Liberty Journal, LexInc Reviews, Variety, Apple, Latest Movie Trailers, iTunes, Top 10 Songs, Top 10 Albums. The LexInc widget lets you personalize your dashboard even more by giving you a choice from nine different skins. Simply flip LexInc widget over to select your feed and the skin you prefer before you enjoy the slick design and all the latest entertainment info of your choice at your fingertips. So again, LexInc widget can be found at LexInc.com and you'll also find a link to that in our show notes. Next in Widget Related News, we have a new widget that is out by the creators over at MacTactic. You can find them at MacTactic.com. MacTactic widget is a simple and stunning widget that lets you track Mac releases from inside the dashboard. Simply enter your make and model of a Mac onto the back of the widget and it will tell you when it's time for an upgrade and also the best time to sell your Mac for the highest return on your dollar. So again, MacTactic, really cool, practical widget that will actually help you when deciding when to get a new Mac. Now Ron Miller over at Ron Miller blog, you can find that at bryanmiller.typepad.com has posted a very informative step-by-step Mac tricks for the dashboard over his blog. He's put together a brief walkthrough of some of the basic features of dashboard in Mac OS X Tiger. Quoted from the website, if like me, you are new to Mac, you might have a hard time understanding how dashboard works. Trouble is, the dashboard doesn't behave like other Mac programs, so you may find it confusing figuring out how to configure a widget or how to remove one from the dashboard. Follow the instructions below and you should be all set. Now when we started this podcast almost a year ago, we targeted this podcast towards beginner widget developers and widget designers, but there are widget users that are subscribing and we want to put this out there as a public service. If you're interested in configuring other widgets that you may not have, not sure how to do that, go ahead and you'll find the link to this in the show notes. You'll always find the show notes at www.widgetshow.com. Now the next widget that we have to talk about today is called the 3D IP Lookup Widget and you can find the link to this again in the show notes. The 3D IP Lookup Widget visualizes the geographical location of the host from a traceroute output in Google Earth. 3D IP Lookup Web Service is an experimental tool to generate Google Earth plugins from traceroute outputs. Have you ever wondered where the heck in the world was the IP address 158.42.4.23? That you see in your blog statistics? Once there was an app called Visual Route that tried to plot a 2D world map. It would just hop on the traceroute from your computer to the IP address but man, 2D is just not happening. I want to see the route in that gorgeous Google Earth 3D map so I built this service or he built this service that creates Google Earth plugins using geographical information from my IP address lookup service. So again, a really cool visual way to find out where people are coming from that are visiting your blog, commenting on your blog and again you can find the link to this really cool widget in the show notes. Alright, Google has put up a page on their website called Convert Google Widgets. Now Google widgets, the Google Gadgets directory contains thousands of gadgets you can use on various Google.com sites. In October 2006 they released Google Gadgets for your page allowing you to embed your favorite gadgets in your blogs, websites and other pages. Now you can take Google Gadgets and convert them to run in your Windows Vista sidebar or Mac OS X dashboard with the use of third party applications. This is trivial to do. Mesa Dynamics offers a free widget converter application called Amnesty Generator which we talked about on this blog before which allows you to convert Google Gadgets into Mac OS X dashboard widgets. Now what they're doing is they're creating ways to convert Google so that it will run on anything. You can find this link in our show notes. It's a really cool and interesting way of approaching widgets. Widgets are no longer just OS X or confabulator or Yahoo based. Widgets are now consumed every facet of our lives from cell phones to blogs, web pages and more. And you can find out more information on Widgetpedia.com. Yep that's right, Widgetpedia covers all widgets, web, Mac, Windows Vista and more. You can add your widget to their gallery and see thousands of others on there. The cool part is that some of these widgets are from dashboard and the web so you can place this widget on your website as well as the dashboard and you can browse literally thousands of widgets. It's a really great site, well designed and you can find that again at Widgetpedia.com. Alright so that's what's happening in the world of dashboard and widgets. Now we're going to switch gears and jump right into the audio portion of the DashCode tutorial. Now the DashCode tutorial for today is going to be covering the countdown widget. So if you have DashCode opened up you can go ahead and launch the countdown widget template. And when you look over to the side you'll see some workflow steps. And the very first thing that we're going to have to do is click on countdown properties. So click the little play button where it says countdown properties and then you'll see a long list. You'll see identity, network, disk access, extensions, plug-in name and properties. Now down where it says properties you can see where it says target kind, date and time, iCal event and shared calendar. Yep you can use this countdown widget to count down to an iCal event or calendar that's shared on the internet. So this is really flexible and it's amazing, amazing, amazing. Now where it says date and time you can add your own date and time. I'm going to go ahead and plug in my birthday here at 12pm. Now it says when reached stop at zero or start counting up. So you can have this as a reverse countdown widget. A problem with a lot of countdown widgets are that when you use them and when they finally reach their zero state they can no longer be used again. But if you do this you can actually have it count up which is actually kind of interesting. Alright you can have the separators blank. You can also show leading zeros. Now mark that as done. When that's done then you should go to the set attributes. Go ahead and change the attribute where it says widget identifier and that will be something like com.yourname.widget.and then the name of your widget and you'll see the version number off to the right hand side. When you're done mark all these as done and that's pretty much it. You would want to design the widget icon and you're going to want to test it and share it and those are two things that we're going to go over in the visual side of the podcast. We're going to be releasing, each week we're going to be releasing a video podcast that shows the step by step Dash Code tutorial along with this audio portion. So stay tuned for the video portion of the Dash Code tutorial. I hope you guys enjoyed the podcast today. If you guys need any help with your widgets let us know at widgetshow at gmail.com. If you are a widget developer or designer have you developed or designed something amazing then 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 and we'll throw it right on the show blog. Again that's widgetshow at gmail.com. If you'd like to contribute to the show reviewing products that have been reviewed here on the show send your reviews to widgetshow at gmail.com. To get your widget added to the podcast please contact me also at widgetshow at gmail.com. The show has a hotline at 206-333-0417 that's 206-333-0417. If you have a comment for the show call the number leave a voicemail and we'll add that into the podcast. If you have a question also please feel free to email me. We are looking for staff writers if you have something to share with the widget community drop me a line and we'll post it on the show blog. If you have an announcement for your own widget website if you've created a cool tutorial and you'd like to share it with others then give us a quick jingle and we'll put that right on the show blog. Also check out the show forum. The show forum is a place for everyone to come together and share about everything widget and dashboard related. You can find that at forum.widgetshow.com. Now like I said before stay tuned because we have a video podcast which you probably already downloaded and we're going to switch over to the video side of things right now and we're going to start our video tutorial for the countdown widget in Dash Go. Now I hope you guys enjoyed the podcast today and I will see you all next time on the flip side of things. Take care.
