[DB75]

Golf Tips 1.1 Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X

After much feedback and incredible interest in Golf Tips I'm glad to announce version 1.1. It's a minor release which includes the following new features:

- New tip displayed whenever Dashboard is activated
- Darker background color makes tips easier to read
- Ability to click on golf ball to get new tip

I'm amazed at the amount of interest from the Mac community and will continue to work to improve the product. The next version will have better support for scrolling and a few other features. But let me not get ahead of myself and please enjoy the newest version. You can click here to get it and you can see a screenshot here:

If you have any suggestions for the next version then please feel free to contact me.

Safari and XMLHttpRequest

I was working on finishing version 1.1 of my Golf Tips widget and ran into a little problem. I've been adding the functionality to click on the golf ball to get a new tip. The problem was that the requests appeared to be cached and each request after the first would return an error. The initial code looked like this:

function getData()
{
req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.onreadystatechange = processReqChange;
req.open("GET", "http://www.db75.com", true);
req.send(null);
}

After searching around for answers I stumbled across the setRequestHeader attribute. With this attribute we can essentially set an expiration date that will essentially tell the request object to always make the request. The modified code looks like:

function getData()
{
req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.onreadystatechange = processReqChange;
req.open("GET", "http://www.db75.com", true);
req.setRequestHeader('If-Modified-Since', 'Wed, 18 May 2005 00:00:00 GMT');
req.send(null);
}

This means that version 1.1 of Golf Tips should be available later today! Just doing some final testing and I'll post when it's ready.

Mac OS X Dashboard Widget - Golf Tips 1.1

So it's been a little over a week since I released my Golf Tips widget. To my amazement it's received over 5,000 downloads! I'm currently working on the next minor version which has a darker background color due requests from users. The white text on the light green background is a bit hard to read.

The widget will have better support for cycling through tips. I'm thinking of allowing users to click on the golf ball to switch to the next tip. I know it's not the most intuitive, but I want to keep the interface simple. I'm sure I'll do a redesign in the future where I can address these items in more detail. Anyway, I'm glad to see there's a great golf interest in the Mac community. If you have any suggestions please post them here.

Golf Tips 1.0 on Apple Downloads Site

My Golf Tips widget was approved on the Apple downloads site. You can check it out and download a copy here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/dashboard/golftips.html

Mac OS X Golf Tips Dashboard Widget

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.