NZMac.com - Supporting the New Zealand Mac community

Coincidences are a great thing! NZMac.com site users have been having discussions in the NZMac.com Forum about streaming New Zealand radio stations within iTunes recently whilst at the same time, the NZMac.com news and forum widget was finally re-released.

As I checked on my listing of the widget on the Apple.com site, I spotted a widget that streamed radio stations, contacted the author and have spent the past two days furiously developing an NZMac.com version for NZ Radio stations...and here it is! It's at version 0.6, but I'm just too excited to keep it quiet!

Now, I need to make a few things clear. First, my mantra still holds true..."I'm no programmer". I can understand code enough to hack it, but the widget is the direct result of a lot of other talented people...specifically Thomas at suppazone.dk, who graciously allowed me to take his widget and run with it...Craig Stanton who helped me with the first NZMac.com widget and offered some good advice on where to search the net for the right code for this one...and Cian Walsh, our graphic designer from the first widget, whose look and feel I've moved across in some degree to this widget. I just took their expertise and...well..hacked it :-)

Next, this widget will only be able to stream radio stations that can be listened to within the QuickTime player. This means stations that stream in QuickTime or Windows Media (more on that in a moment) format and not in Real format. I've released the widget now, as I need you all to test it and I need some more radio stations to link to. I figured you'd all tell me what stations you want. But can I stress, for the sake of my sanity, they must be New Zealand based radio stations!

The widget takes advantage of the fact that the Flip4Mac WMV Player (free to Mac users) can be installed (it MUST be installed for this widget!) and plays within QuickTime, opening up a whole range of radio stations to us. It is important (from what I've read) that the older and now obsolete Windows Media Player needs to be removed from your machine in order for this widget to work, but you can all confirm that for me.

You also need to make sure that once installed, you go to your System Preferences and change one setting in the Flip4Mac plugin, making sure the setting indicated below is ticked.

Even at version 0.6, the widget makes use of the auto-update-checker-thingy (that's a technical term there) so I won't need to tell you when there is a new version of the widget available, it will tell you itself. Once we've added in a few more radio stations and I'm happy it's working well, we'll move it up to version 1.0 and post it on the Apple site.

P.S. The widget (as with our news and forum widget) is released under a Creative Commons License, meaning you are welcome to take the widget and make use of the code and design for non-commercial purposes. Please look at the source code for details related to the license and the requirements of it...but as with the first widget, let's hope this sees many more widgets appearing out there!

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