The Flip Side 9.10.2006

The Flipside with John Brown discusses various widget news and topics. They mention TacoWidget's MadLibs widget, Abracadabra which hides files on your system, and Cloudlicious which organizes Delicious tags. They also talk about new features in the Leopard operating system, such as widgets on the desktop and syncing with .Mac. The interview segment features Alexander Grieksbor discussing the creation of the Piano Chords widget. Sunday, September 10th, 2006, Episode 19, Welcome to the Flipside with John Brown. Hi, and welcome to the Flipside with John Brown. I'm your host, and today we have a lot of widget news and topics to talk about, so let's just dive right in. First thing that we want to talk about today is TacoWidget's MadLibs widget, which I mentioned before they were having a secret widget being released. It was released on September 3rd. It is a MadLibs widget. It allows you to have all the fun with many different MadLibs built right into the widget, and the ability to auto-generate words if you feel too lazy to actually complete the form fields, or save your MadLib as a text file if you have a particularly creative MadLib. Really great widget, simple, clean, stylish, and it does exactly what it says. Head over to TacoWidgets.com, check it out. Next in widget news, I found a really great widget called Abracadabra. This widget allows you to hide files on your system from people looking at your system. They won't be able to see your files, the files that are hidden with Abracadabra, and also these files are also hidden from Spotlight, and so people can't even search for those files. So, if you have sensitive files on your computer, and you want a quick, easy way to hide those files from other people viewing your computer, then Abracadabra, the widget, might just be a great solution for you. I'll have more information and links in the show notes, so check it out. Another great widget out there is Cloudlicious. Now Cloudlicious works off of the Delicious tags, and allows you to input your username and password for Delicious, and it will take all of your Delicious tags and arrange them in a cloud, and what this does is allows you to organize and view your Delicious tags right in the dashboard. So it can integrate websites, and when you change your dashboard preferences, it will automatically remember those tags. Clicking on the tag opens a sidebar that allows all links associated with that tag. Clicking on the link in the sidebar automatically opens that in the browser. So again, if you're into Delicious, and Delicious tags, and you want a dashboard widget that allows you to automatically launch these things right in the web, then Cloudlicious is the widget for you. Now talking about Leopard, the new release of 10.5 operating system from Apple, there were a lot of features that we didn't get to see, or that we didn't know about in the dashboard, a lot of top secret things. There was a post over at a blog, and they actually reveal some of the top secret things that Apple has not told us about dashboard. Dashboard will get a system preferences icon in Leopard. Dashboard will appear in the application switcher, so you'll actually be able to switch through to the dashboard. Widgets can now be placed on the desktop, which is big, okay? If one drags an icon to the board and waits two seconds, it will be placed in the board. The board will fade out, and you can place it on the desktop. That icon will appear in the dock, and it will be treated as an application. So the widgets will actually be on your desktop, but they will be an application. Now this is very similar to Amnesty widget singles. If you've ever seen that application, it turns any widget into an application launchable in the dock. Next, you can also keep widgets in the dock either by dragging them there from the dashboard or keeping them there when they appear on the desktop. In the dock will be the X icon for closing the widget on top of the widget icon, not on the actual widget itself. So when you drag the widget to the desktop, you will close the widget via the dock, not the actual widget itself. There will also be a selection of different animations that you can choose from when in your dashboard. You can also isolate the dashboard in a similar way to front row. You can push the desktop as an expose item to the side and isolate the dashboard that way. You can also isolate dashboard via a cube effect. You can open dashboard in a similar way to F11. The widgets will hide at the side and come forward for use. In this one, the dashboard will not be isolated, hot corners and F numbers can be configured to use one of them. So you have a different function key for each effect. In the isolated dashboard with background will be black but will act as a pool of water in a similar way as now. So when you drag a widget around, you can create ripples. Also you can choose from water, air, space and metal as your chosen set of widget animations. Air and metal animations are not elaborated on yet but space acts a bit like a black hole when you remove a widget and the widgets zoom in. There will also be a whole new edition of many new widgets. I've already seen two, the web clip widget of course which allows you to take a clipping from any website via a button in Safari. Also a new movie theaters widget which was actually leaked out and this widget will allow you to search movie times in your local area. So again, lots of great features coming in Tiger, lots of things that we were all hoping for, widgets on the desktop which is something that was big in everyone's mind, being able to treat them as an application might not be what people were looking for, cluttering up space in the dock but I'm sure there will be third party solutions to get around that. Alright, so that was a report on some of the new features in 10.5 Leopard as far as dashboard. The last thing I wanted to talk about today as far as widget related news was more thoughts on Leopard and the dashboard. One of the things that we did get some insight on when Steve introduced dashboard was the ability for .Mac syncing. Now a lot of people are really down on .Mac. I'm a .Mac user and subscriber and I find that the .Mac items that you get for your money are actually pretty good but they could be better and I think that integrating the dashboard with .Mac is a really great way to continue to broaden the services offered by .Mac. So basically how this works is whenever you change your preferences, you can save those preferences to your .Mac account. Now like we said before in Leopard, the dashboard will get its own icon in system preferences so those preferences will be saved to .Mac. Also I believe the position and the amount of widgets you have open will also be saved to your .Mac folder so that when you log in to .Mac, you will get the dashboard from a previous system pending that you actually have those widgets on that system. So again .Mac syncing, a really great way to integrate dashboard with some really good .Mac services. Today we're interviewing Alexander Grieksbor from Germany, the creator of the Piano Chords widget. Now as soon as this widget was created, it really caught my eye. Now basically it's simple, elegant and has the style that we all Mac users love. It's functionality is simple and it does exactly what it says. A small piano on your dashboard to help you hear and visually see which keys on the piano create what note keys. This is great whether you are a piano player or not. It's a great companion to GarageBand and it's an amazing widget. We had an opportunity to talk with him about his reactions and how he created the widget. It's really great to see how people from all over the world collaborate together to create some of the most amazing widgets on the web today. So without too much delay, here is the interview between Alexander Grieksbor and talking about the Piano Chords widget. Enjoy. Hi Alex, thanks for being here today. The first question we had for you about your Piano Chords widget was what inspired you to make this great widget? Hi John, thanks for having me on your show. The story about Piano Chords goes back quite some time now. I kind of taught myself how to play keyboards a while ago and unfortunately I didn't have much time lately but about a year ago. We decided with some folks from work to start a band. Just for an occasional band, for one particular post-doctoral retreat, I'm a scientist at the Adelaide Cancer Institute and with all the post-doctoral fellows we had a retreat and we decided to form a one-time band. So I had to pick up my keyboard playing again. One thing while studying all the music that we would play was that I time after time had to look up all these chords that we have to play and I always used a website for that. There are some really nice websites with a Javascript piano layout, a bit basic but it would really show you nicely the different chords that I wanted to look up and after a while I discovered actually that all these sites were sharing the same Javascript as their backend and this Javascript turned out to be of Colm McCarty. But then it hit me that it would actually be nice to have a widget to quickly look up all the piano chords. So that was when I decided to use also Colm's script and Javascript and build piano chords around it. Well that's great. It's really amazing to see how people can collaborate together and create some pretty great and amazing usable widgets around Javascript and around people's needs so that's really great. The thing I really like about the widget is the fact that when you press on the keys it actually plays the chord. Was this a really difficult feature to implement or was this pretty easy? So soon after we released piano chords on our website it got downloaded like I don't know how many times, really many, many times and people were really enthusiastic. It resembled the Intervasive Garage Band and people really liked it and yeah I got a lot of feature requests and one of them obviously was can you make the widget play the chord when you press it, when you select one and I thought a bit about it and looked around and then I found some sample code from Apple that's showing you how to use the QuickTime architecture. It needed to be done via a plugin, a so called Cocoa plugin, but luckily I have a lot of Cocoa programming experience so in the end it wasn't even that difficult, it was a nice sample and I incorporated it and it's just really nice and people are really enthusiastic about it. Do you think beyond yourself that there was a really big need for a widget like this? Now you already told us that you used this widget because of your piano playing experience but do you think there was a great need for a widget like this or did you just develop it sort of for fun? So like I said a lot of people downloaded piano chords and we got really enthusiastic reactions so yeah I think there is a clear need or there is a clear use and there are many people who reacted very enthusiastically and again there were a lot of websites and I guess they had a lot of visitors but it's just so much easier to have such a widget at your hand always in your desk board and I think that this is one of the examples where desk board is made for. I mean when you quickly want to look up something you just hit the keyboard and you know immediately which chord is what and yeah I use it a lot and I think a lot of people like it a lot so yeah. Well that's great. We already talked about sort of the response. You really did get quite a large response. How has the widget been as far as success? Do you think that this has been a really big success developing and releasing the widget to the public and getting a good response from people downloading it and using your widget on a daily basis? Oh yeah definitely. I think in terms of download I don't remember exactly but I think we have by now about 80,000 widgets downloaded and for instance we have been in the top 10 of Apple's widget page and for quite some while actually and I regularly get people letting me know by email that they really like it. So yeah I'm very enthusiastic about it but again it's an example where I had a personal question or a personal need for a specific widget and I created it and we put it on our website and luckily we were not the only ones who very much liked it. And one anecdote that might actually be nice to mention is that one of the people who used the Anacords actually reported a bug in Qom's original JavaScript code and that code was already 8 years old by then. So actually a lot of websites who use Qom's code never discovered that thanks to PianoCord that bug was found 8 years later and we fixed it. So even in that respect PianoCord was very successful. Well that's great. I really enjoyed talking about this widget with you and I'm very happy that it's very successful. Talking about musical widgets there are not too many around and yours is definitely one of the most popular ones. Are you planning on making any other musical widgets? No, no I'm afraid not. Unfortunately we have very little time right now. Tom and I both have our graduation coming up on the 1st of November and that costs so much time. And in addition we have a number of other programs that we develop, scientific programs and that just takes up so much time that there is little time left. But you know like this program started because I needed a widget to look up chords and you never know when I again get some time to play keyboards and I have some needs and who knows I might think of another one. Well thank you very much for having this interview with us today. Can you share with anyone who maybe has not tried your wonderful widget where they can go ahead and download that and try it out? You're welcome John, absolutely. For anyone interested in piano chords or any of our other widgets I urge you to look at our website. It's mekentosj.com which is spelled as M-E-K-E-N-T-O-S-J dot com. Go to our widget page and download piano chords. We also talked about earlier that you actually were at the WWTC and you were going to tell us a little bit about some of your programs and your experience there. Can you share a little bit about that? Yes, that's right. As I said we have developed a number of scientific programs. We are biologists and actually this year on the WWTC we won the Apple Design Award for one of them which is called EnzymeX which is a tool for molecular biologists and we have a number of freeware programs that are used a lot in laboratories in science and it was great to be at the WWTC. There were a lot of new things coming for developers in Leopard and also especially for dashboard developers. There are a lot of things going on and I'm me too. I look forward to all the new widgets that will be developed for Leopard. Well again thanks and for those of you who haven't tried out the widget head over to this website. There will be a link in the show notes and again thank you Alex for joining us. Thanks. Talk to you later John. So that was the interview with Alexander Grigspor and the Piano Chords widget. Again there's a link in the show notes. Check it out. Send us your audio comments. Widgetshowatgmail.com. Ask us any questions. Also send those to widgetshowatgmail.com. It's a new month so please head over to Podcast Alley and vote for the flip side. We appreciate your votes. There's a link on the show blog www.widgetshow.com and also check out our show forum at forum.widgetshow.com. There you'll find a community of widget developers who are willing to answer any questions you have about your widget. Also we are looking for people to host to the show blog. So if you're a writer, a blogger and you have a gift for writing and you want to write for the flip side, send us your name and your resume as well as some writing samples and we will consider you for hosting blogs at www.widgetshow.com. All right. So anyway, we have show notes linked to everything that we talked about in the show on the website. Check it out. And again, we have a hotline so if you feel like asking a question or send an audio comment to us, head over to the show blog www.widgetshow.com and leave us a message. All right. So that's about it for today. Short and sweet. And I hope you guys all enjoyed the show. It was a pleasure making it for you. I will catch you guys all next time on the flip side. Bye.