Mac OS X Widgets
In 2005, Apple released the 5th version of their operating system Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger.” With this release then included an incredibly useful tool called Dashboard. Inside dashboard you could run a number of different widgets, which are tiny applications used for a single task like calculators, notepads, timers, etc. Apple made it incredibly easy to develop these widgets, so in my free time at school I decided to give it a swing.
First I made a simple clock widget. Dashboard already came with an analog clock widget, but I knew many others as well as myself would prefer a digital clock display instead. It was well received, so I decided to add a few more features such as multiple sizes and colors. One simply had to flip the widget over, and choose the options they wanted. This widget is still available for download on Apple’s site.
Next I made another simple widget that would perform a search on BibleGateway.com. Type in your query, and your web browser would take you to the page with your results. Flipping the widget over would reveal all the multiple translations and languages of the Bible that Bible Gateway had available for searches. This widget is still available for download on Apple’s site.
Around the same time I noticed there were a lot of simple widgets that would read a news feed from a site, but nothing existed for CNN’s site. I put together a widget that would read all the different news feeds from CNN’s website, and if you only wanted to see a certain type of news you could simply flip it over and select the feed you wanted to see. I originally made this widget match CNN’s website style at the time just for consistency, unfortunately that didn’t turn out to well. When this widget was recognized by Steve Jobs at WWDC 2005, he made a particular note that it didn’t look as nice as the Business Week widget! What an honor to receive a design critique from Steve Jobs himself! After the shock wore off, I decided that it did look pretty bad, so I gave it a facelift, and hopefully Steve liked this revision much better.
Unfortunately, CNN has since changed how their feed works, and I no longer have time to develop for this widget, so it is no longer available for download.
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