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Sometimes I get carried away and work on stuff that might be considered completely useless and assumes no monetary value. Sometimes I just have to take on a project for the challenge and the benefit of learning. When I purchased the latest version of OS X (Tiger) a couple of weeks ago I fell into the Dashboard Widget void. I was blown away by the user experience and was drawn into the challenge of developing the widget. There are many facets of development that need to be understood when developing a widget. I'm not going to cover this details right now but will go into detail in a future post.
This entry is mainly an announcement of my first Dashboard Widget - Golf Tips 1.0. You can see a screen below and I'll be working to improve the look and feel as well as functionality in the coming weeks. I'm really interested to know how many Mac users are golf fanatics. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the widget and please feel free to drop me a line if you have any feature requests, suggestions, or bugs. Click here for a direct link to the page where I'll keep the widget updated.
I love the idea of the golf tips widget. I'm here is sunny San Diego and golf has become one of my favorite pastimes. The one time I'm having trouble with is get my tip to change. Does it change daily, hourly or what?
Posted by: Steven Henry at May 9, 2005 12:23 PMSteven,
Thanks for the feedback on the widget and it definitely needs some work. I have a version that updates everytime you open bring up the Dashboard but I have a few bugs to get worked out. Would you ultimately like to see a "next tip" button? I struggled with the thought of this but decided to leave it out for the initial release.
In the meantime, you can always click on the component and hit Command - R and it will do a cool little animation and refresh. That should get you by until I release the next version. Please let me know if you have any other questions and thanks for the feedback!
Posted by: Dennis Baldwin at May 9, 2005 01:18 PMLooks like a great little widget. Tried it, but failed to load anything (error: failed to load data). Possible it's firewall related? What port does it use to get the info?
In any case, looks like a neat widget... I'll have to try it from a non-firewalled connection and see.
Thanks!
Posted by: Bob Montgomery at May 10, 2005 01:32 PMBob,
Thanks for the response. You bring up an interesting issue that I never even thought of. The widget currently grabs data from port 8080. I will work on getting this updated to port 80 for the next version. I appreciate the positive feedback and please stay tuned for updates.
Best Regards,
Dennis
Dennis,
I gave it a shot at home last night over a non-firewalled connection, and it did, indeed, work fine. That seems to be the issue, port number.
In any case, thanks again for the great widget and looking forward to any updates.
Bob M.
Posted by: Bob Montgomery at May 11, 2005 09:50 AMGreat work !!
I have recently become absolutely addicted to golf - this season is my first real season.
When I came across your widget, I downloaded it in a heartbeat.
Looks great and works well, although I do have to prompt it to give me the next tip...
keep it up !