NZMac.com Widget v0.7 - Wow!!

Written by Philip Roy | 23 May 2005
Posted in Site News

UPDATE You know you are part of an incredibly supportive and talented community when the likes of Cian Walsh and Craig Stanton answer your plea for help to develop the NZMac.com widget further.

Without them, the incredibly professional and superb widget (I'm very proud of it, but it's all thanks to these guys) would never have been possible. So here it is...NZMac.com Widget, version 0.7....wow! Download it now!

The enhancements started when Cian surprised the heck of of me by sending through the very cool graphics that go to make up the icon and widget that you see. Cian may be familiar to forum readers as the friendly Irish chap that posted some cool NZ icons for us all and that are now available from his website (www.afterglow.ie).

As we discussed the widget, I managed to get more code working, including the "flip" to the reverse side of the Widget and the "i" preference button working....but I was stuck at that point...both in terms of getting more to happen and in sorting out the bugs.

As if somehow reading my mind (I literally was starting to type a forum posting asking for help) Craig came to the rescue and took the hacked, pasted and generally shoddy code I'd put together and made it all work beautifully. And work it does....and look very cool it does also (sounding a bit like Yoda there, sorry)!!

So thank you so much to Cian and Craig. You are all now welcome to download the Widget and use with Mac OS Tiger. I've intentionally left the version at 0.7 and not jumped it up to version 1.0 as I'm sure there is some tweaks that people might want to see.

Macguide writers were given a sneak peek at the widget and one has already asked if there will be a Konfabulator version. Hmm, I'm not sure, but I will mull it over. However the makers of the Amnesty tool (in development to help people test widgets outside of Dashboard) now say the product works for Panther users running OS X 10.3.9, so maybe we should just suggest that if you are using Panther, grab Amnesty and see how it and the NZMac.com widget get on...
http://www.mesadynamics.com/amnesty.htm

As to those bound to ask about how to make a Widget, I suggest you do as I did...download a few, find where they go on your machine (/Library/Widgets and also /username/Library/Widgets) and control-click on them and choose "Show Package Contents" from the pop-up menu. Drag the files you see out to a folder and start having a play.

Best of luck with the widget development. Enjoy the widget everyone.