QotD: Widgets
Posted March 9th, 2005 @ 02:52am by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: If you could create any (reasonable) Dashboard Widget, what would you have it do?
My Answer: I don't see myself using Dashboard much, actually. Everything I need is already in the current layer. The calculator will come in handy, but that's hardly imaginative. Perhaps a very simple and effective to-do list with reminders of some kind, or something that integrates with Mantis (our bug-tracking software).
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Posted 09 Mar 2005 at 12:20am #
For me it'd probably aggregate a number of different services at work: bug tracking, project blogs, builds ...
Posted 09 Mar 2005 at 12:31am #
A widget for viewing web cams and X10 Wireless Cameras.
A widget for tracking packages.
A quote of the day widget (good quotes, ones from the Tae Te Ching & Confucius, Einstein, etc.).
A IM buddy list widget.
A security event widget ( displaying a machine's firewall logs - if there are any - showing dropped connections, etc. )
A Widget that would work with an SNMP server to display some "network health" information, or a widget that worked with something like MRTG to
display network bandwidth graphs, etc.
A "netstat" widget for displaying current network connections and listening services.
A content publishing widget - post to your blog from a widget.
Maybe a "who's on" widget that displays unix 'who' information. Link the 'who' information to the unix "talk" command for a "talk" widget.
A rendezvous widget ( like looking at the Rendezvous links under bookmarks in Safari).
A weather-bug widget (this one is obvious and should have been already done by someone).
A community event widget. Retrieve info. about upcoming community events - or tie this to an iCal calendar.
A sports event score widget. Baseball, football, hockey etc.
A poetry of the day widget. Or Haiku of the day widget.
A dictionary widget. This may seem more reasonable to some than others...
Sorry if any of these have already been suggested, or if any stretch past the realm of "reasonable".
Posted 09 Mar 2005 at 9:19am #
I'm a database application developer, and before we had DBAs the developers had to keep tabs on the live servers. I wanted a widget to collect stats on the various databases.
Posted 10 Mar 2005 at 9:57am #
I'd write en expression solver calculator. Two fields, enter an expression on top, answer goes in the bottom.
I've already written such an app in Cocoa, but it seems perfect for a widget. And, I could drop my entire solver framework and replace it with a call to javascript's eval()
Posted 12 Mar 2005 at 4:16am #
package tracking and googlemaps.
...maybe something to post to a blog or livejournal or something, maybe interface a little with ebay, maybe a tiny quick little FTP app when i just want to upload an image to my server quickly. those are all kind of extraneous.
I know i'll use the calculator all the time; i just hope it has papertape.
I'll probably use the dictionary, and get rid of OmniDictionary... omnidictionary's services shortcut never works for me and so i just keep the app in my dock. it'd be nice to be rid of it though.
x10 cameras would be rad, but i didn't even know x10 could interface with OS X. i'll have to give them a second look.