Design a Widget !

Ric

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Well if anyone out there wants to help or have a go themselves...in my spare time I have decided to have a go at writing a widget.

I shall be studying this article closely. Widgets

I am going to try and make a RSS reader widget for this site...

...have no idea what I am doing but I just feel like having a go.

Let me know if anyone else is tempted, and we'll see what we can come up with !

One month from now...and on the Apple widget page...have to have, something to aim for !!
 

Ric

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Well this page should help speed ujp the 'coding' process...

SampleRSS

I'll have a proper read of everything tonight...prototype shouldn't take long !

If anyone wants to follow what I'm doing you need 'Tiger' and you need to install the developers tools from the Tiger DVD.

According to Apple's pages to 'make' a widget you need "...a mix of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS."

Doesn't sound to bad !
 

Ric

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Just for the record I am going to follow the tutorial here

From what I have read so far you don't really need the developers tools installed ( I have them on my Mac already) but I may be wrong. The only reason that I can see so far is that you can use the plist editor on the developer tools, but Plist editing and creating can be done in any text editor program.

I am going to work my way through the tutorial once the little ankle biter has gone to bed, first beta version should be online in a bit...
 

Ric

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Well have read up now to dive in...

Stage one.

Create an empty folder on your desktop and rename it mac-help.wdgt
 

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Ric

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Stage two.

Control click on the widget and click on the 'Show Package Contents'.

Copy all the contents from the previously downloaded 'sampleRSS' from Apple, into the widget package.

Should look like this...
 

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Ric

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Will post the other stages tonight...

... I can't get the Apple sampleRSS to work, at all. ?!@£@?!@?

Not sure if it's something to do with quicktime update, bug !

Have gone down a different route...

Sample screen below, a work in progress, design element to come later, just getting the mechanics to work first !!!
 

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Ric

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For those of you that are having a go at this yourself...

...for some reason the 'original' version downloaded from the Apple website doesn't appear to work. Not even in it's vanilla state ?

If you change it to a wdgt and name it accordingly then it should display one of the Apple RSS feeds...but it doesn't well not here anyway.

So if anyone else has any luck with it let me know...

I'll carry on working on the alternate version...
 

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