I have been building Dashboard widgets since the feature was first released with Mac OS X 10.4, summer of 2005.
I have had a widget be the featured widget on Apple.com, another been a staff pick, and a couple of them have hung around the Top 50 list at different times.
My widgets have been distributed with magazines on CD-ROM in France, Germany and Taiwan, written about in MacWorld and other online publications, and been the subject of several podcasts and blog posts.
Like my widgets? Find them useful? Support my work with a few Euros as thanks and to encourage me to write more!
Warning: Dashboard Widgets are kind of not really a thing anymore. This page is here primarily for posterity’s sake. If any of the widgets work for you, great. If they don’t…sorry, but I offer them with no support or liability, you know, like if they delete your entire filesystem. Which is unlikely, but I’m just covering my bases.
diggstream streams real-time activity from digg.com using Digg's streaming API.
Courtesy of VersionTracker
PHP Function Reference provides fast lookup of information about the PHP web programming language.
Mac OS X 10.4.x users: The latest versions of PHPfr are not compatible with Tiger. You are welcome to download the 0.9 version of the widget. The documentation is a bit out of date, but you may still find it useful.
Courtesy of VersionTracker
Make-A-Pass generates secure, random passwords.
Courtesy of VersionTracker
IP Locator provides lookup of IP address geolocation information using the HostIP.info, GEO/IO, and IPGP.net APIs.
Courtesy of VersionTracker
GetDilbert brings everyone’s favorite knowledge worker to your Dashboard.
These are widgets I have built for clients or employers.
Web hosting company, HostNine, approached me to build a widget that would notify employees when there are faults on their servers. The widget uses Growl to alert users when the Dashboard is hidden.
Note: this widget is not available for download because it is intended only for use by internal HostNine staff.
I built this widget for both Dashboard and Yahoo! Widgets for a PR firm working with the American grocery chain Whole Foods. It pulls in the RSS feed of their blog and podcast.
This widget lets you track time on projects within Basecamp. It taps into the Basecamp API and is localized in several languages. I built it when I worked for Clearwired Web Services in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The beautiful icon is the work of Mark Bixby.
Update: Clearwired has closed up shop. I am offering this download link out of the goodness of my heart.
These widgets are no longer in active development. They’re here mostly for hysterical, er… historical purposes.
I built this widget as a thank you to @heheboy for being my 1000th follower on Twitter.
TheObfuscator takes whatever string you give it and changes it into a bunch of HTML-encoded gobbledygook. This is a technique sometimes used to combat spam, hence the interface.
SlideShow displays a slideshow (funny, that) of some of my photographs. It was an early example of the use of Quartz methods and the canvas tag, so Apple made it their featured widget for a few days. Killed my bandwidth, but the recognition was nice!
SnippetComposer shows an HTML rendered version of whatever you type in the upper pane. I thought it might be useful for composing simple bits of HTML.
MyResolution displays the resolution of the current monitor. It also uses a simple AppleScript to link to the Display System Preference so you can change your resolution.
When the iTunes Store was nearing its 1 billionth song sold, Apple had a countdown on their web site. I lifted the code and widgetized it. Never did hear from Apple legal, so I guess they didn’t mind too much.
Mac OS X v.10.4 Tiger is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, the widget installer appears. Click Install if you want the widget installed on your Mac. If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive and open it to show the widget installer.
Keep up with the latest on my widgets by subscribing to my RSS feed.
It’s a little dated at this point, but this was once a much linked-to tutorial about developing Dashboard widgets. I suppose it still has something to offer the fledgling widget author.
This brief article shares some example code for debugging JavaScript within widgets.
I have been the guest on Jon Brown’s The Flip Side twice now. The following are the episodes on which I have appeared:
The following are articles tagged with the topic Widgets from my blog.
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