Share your widgets!

jeb1138

jeb1138

Carioca
How many new widget-makers do we have here at MacOSX.com? :D Here's mine:

:D My first Widget! :D :D
An 'improved' calendar app. I couldn't see Arlo's calendar widget on my desktop very well and didn't like not being able to easily customize the colors & opacity, so I learned about widget making by tweaking his. May I present CalendarPlus! :) It's got a preference menu with about 6 things you can easily change. Some additional stuff is now done automatically too.

http://homepage.mac.com/jeb1138/.Public/MacOSX.com/CalendarPlus.widget.sit

CalendarPlusScreen.jpg


Unfortunately, I'm not real good with Photoshop and can't figure out how to make the background pictures look sunken-in to the desktop like Arlo's does. Arlo's guide also says that widget "art assets" are copyrighted, so I had to make all my own image files. If anybody else out there has tweaked their calendar with other stuff, please post and let's share. :) Feel free to use any of my pictures if you find them useful, I included the photoshop files in the package and I ain't holdin' on to any copyright. ;)

So what other widget wonders are y'all making out there?
 
Sweet! If i had the time to learn i'd make a widget! Now can you make your widget minimize when I'm not over it? So it takes up less room? That'd be cool. Or a minimize in place button. OHHHH
 
Maybe we can make a Request-a-widget-Thread?

My request: A widget that shows online buddies from MSN without your messenger (Proteus, MSN Messenger, ....) is open. For me it's not too necessary that you can message the contacts with that widget. It's enough to see who's online/away/busy/... And of course you have to appear offline (r else your contacts try to message you, but the widget isn't capable of receiving them).
 
Originally posted by twister
Sweet! If i had the time to learn i'd make a widget! Now can you make your widget minimize when I'm not over it? So it takes up less room? That'd be cool. Or a minimize in place button. OHHHH
Click to expand...

Hey great idea twister! I don't think it can get 'mouse over' events until you click on it though, well, actually I don't know... sounds very interesting, I'll have to go see what I can do right now! Thanks for the ideas!

One thing I love the most about widgets is that no matter what the author wanted or thought of, you have access to the source code and can tweak it however you want! Kind of like open source except that it's much easier for beginners to get started and the images can be copyrighted (oh yeah, and Arlo gets $$$$. :eek: ;))

Oh yeah -- the 'home' button takes you back to the current month if you've switched months. It doesn't do anything if you're on the current month. I wish I could think of a better icon for it (more intuitive) but I couldn't come up with anything off he top of my mind. If you or anyone else has photoshop I'd love to get any additional backgrounds or icons you can think of. So far I don't think there's a way for a widget tto generate a 'sheet of color' so every background color has to be made as a separate file instead of being able to input the color number like you can do with text.

All my psd files are included in the package so you can check them out if you have Photoshop.

Senne -- the request-a-widget sounds like a great idea! Maybe if we get enough widget-related answers & questions we'll get our own forum someday! :D You should start a thread with your chat widget request. I'm gonna see what I can find out about that too, after I do some more work on CalendarPlus. :D
 
I've got a couple of widgets in the works, though its taking me a little time to adapt to the new language, as I've never done JavaScript before.

I'm making a freenet controller widget that will tell you whether freenet is running or not, with a button to start/stop the servlet, and another to open the freenet home page.

The other is a phases of the moon widget. I've been able to dig up a lot of open-source moonphase stuff so its just a matter of porting it to JavaScript, doing some original graphics and whipping it together. Trouble is I never learned C either, so I'm really flying blind here.

I'd like to add tides to the moon-phase widget, and give it a diver's watch look, but can't even work out where to begin on that. Are tides an astronomical calculation (since they do relate to the moon), or a meterological effect, or both? Is the info available online? How would I determine how tides differ depending on location?
I guess I'll leave that problem until last. It looks like a doozy.
 
Cool! You can do the hover-expand thing twister! This will be awesome! Just add these two lines:
PHP: 
<onMouseEnter>main_window.width = 231</onMouseEnter>
<onMouseExit>main_window.width = 30</onMouseExit>
Underneath this line in Calendar.kon:
PHP: 
<image src="Resources/Calendar/5 Week Background White.png">
Using TextEdit (or whatever you want). Set the window level to topmost in the prefs and you've got an always-present, non-intrusive auto-expanding customizable calendar that will expand when you hover over it! Of course, it's really ugly doing it this way, but it's just a demo. We could have an entirely different smaller icon or mini-calendar image for the non-hovering state. Lots of possibilities! Let me know if you can think of any ideas for what to use as the 'mini-cal'.

(NOTE: you will have to hold down Cmd in order to move the widget after adding the above code)
 
mini-cal could be todays date! Is that easy.

I'll try that code tomorrow to make it shrink. I don't want to shrink mine at home.

Oh and guess what? I hacked in to your calendar app and replaced the background image with a great pict of my girlfriend. Much nicer now :D It'd be sweet if you could 'somehow' let people add their own images. Like make a folder that has to be in a certain directory, with a certain image name. Like

home/documents/CalendarPlus/image.png

Then tell the user that they can put in a png image (of a certain size) in that folder. Then if they select 'image' in the calendar color prefs, it would then look for home/documents/CalendarPlus/image.png and use that image.

Just an idea.
 
That can be done, Twister. You can get an idea of how it might work by looking at the Picture Frame widget.
 
Ohh yea. =D

Now if they'd change monday and friday to weekend days, i could possibly free up some time to make a widget. This sounds cool! Until then i'll just come up with ideas. ;)
 
symphonix -- those sound like cool projects! Give us some beta samples when you start gettin' close, would ya? :) Good luck with 'em!
 
I just bought a MacBook Pro with os 10.4.7 and it doesn't come the stock widget that I need urgently. Can anyone tell me where I can download this stock widget? And where do the build-in widgets reside on the system? Thanks a lot in advance.
 
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