Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with widgets

Heads Up for both Mac and Windows?

rokusan — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:11:08 -0800

Is there a way to make one universal desktop/dashboard for both Mac and Windows? Is there a way to package and deliver desktop gadgets or widgets for Windows and OS X all in the same bundle, or some other combination that can provide for a single universal download?

I've already made a few for myself, but only for OSX, and that's the end of my experience with them. But now I'd like to wrap a few up, polish them a bit, and let clients use them to monitor things too, because I find that a meaningful amount of my time is spent just checking one of them and reporting back to a client question with the result. So I would like to give them a freebie timesaver that will allow them to monitor the info themselves via a desktop doodad.

If they were all OSX users I'd be done now, but these clients aren't all very tech savvy, and they use a mixture of Macs and PCs. I don't want a support nightmare, and I'd prefer not maintaining two different thingies.

The complexity of the gizmos I am interested in would be pretty low: just HTML/Javascript doodads that display info easily sucked from web servers that I can control. (That is, HTTP requests are made for info from mydomain.com, not from Yahoo's stock quotes or anything foreign, so the HTML or RSS or whatever that is served back will always be trusted, reliable and constant.)

The UI needed is nothing fancier than what one gets from Safari's existing "Web Clipping", in fact (just an up to date or 'live' view of some info), but it needs to work as Vista/Win7 desktop gadgets too, and Safari's clips don't do that in Windows.

I know that most such gadgety things are just HTML and JS, so there's no Windows or Mac native code there, so is there any way to avoid making and maintaining two different packages, here?

Also, are there third options that need addressing? Does Konfabulator/or Yahoo Widgets have much of a user base, or can that be ignored in favor of the built-in widgets in recent Windows?

Tell me how to make a simple widget to post on my website.

markcmyers — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:38:20 -0800

Tell me how to make a simple widget to post on my website. A home cook will enter how many cups of an ingredient are called for by a recipe and she'll choose from a list the type of ingredient (e.g. bread flour or baker's sugar) and the widget will convert the volume amount to grams so she can use her food scale to weigh out the ingredient. Can you recommend a widget generator for a nonprogrammer?

Is there a Wordpress widget that will automatically sort the links in my sidebar by date?

jeremias — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 05:46:27 -0800

Is there a Wordpress widget that will automatically sort the links in my sidebar by date? If not, how would I code one? Basically, I'm looking to duplicate the Waxy Links sidebar in a Wordpress theme. I'm currently building a theme in Wordpress 2.8, and the Links widget does about 80% of what I want. (Yes, I have asked this on the Wordpress forum, but the question was competing with the other 8 million questions and have recieved no feedback.)

However, what I'd really like is the following workflow:

I add a new link with the links widget (or alternative) and publish.

The link shows up in the sidebar under a header with the date. Any additional links posted that day would also show up here.

For bonus points, it would be nice if there were some auto-cutoff, so after 25 posted links or so, the oldest links would disappear as the new ones were added

I'm reasonably code savvy, so no fear of php, css, etc. I'm just hoping there's a canned solution that's easy to implement.

If I only had a widget...

nosila — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 06:16:34 -0800

I'm looking for a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that will help me get better at geography. I've found the Worldview Widget and the countries widget, but neither is exactly right.

Ideally, the main interface would be a normal old colored map with country borders and country/capital names that I could zoom into/out of. It would be a bonus if I could switch between a map/satellite view a la Google Maps, but if I had to choose, I would prefer a plain old map.

The Worldview Widget is close, but it's really small, and you can't make it larger. It also doesn't have a non-Google-Earthy map; it's all satellite imagery. I do really like the extra info it gives, though.

The Countries widget is too simplistic.

It is key to me that it works in Dashboard.

Looking for twitter widgets for mac

citybuddha — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:44:27 -0800

I am looking for a twitter widget that is compatable with mac osx 10.4.9. Anyone have any recommendations? spread the love

Time to Pimp My Blog

davidstandaford — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:23:33 -0800

Suggestions for what additions, widgets, extensions, interactive doodads to include on a blogger/blogspot blog. Looking for input from both blog writers and readers. As a side project, I've been keeping a blog where I post one YouTube video per day on a narrow theme. I was wondering if there is anything I should add to the blog (hosted on blogger) that will either be a help to me or that my readers would appreciate.

Currently I have: Contact information, a blogroll, categories for the posts, the blog archive, adsense, and subscription/RSS information.

Things I'm considering: "claiming" the blog on technorati and integrating with that service, setting up a mybloglog account to track my visitors, and a shoutbox that people could leave sitewide comments on.

Is there anything else I'm forgetting/missing? Should I try to find a way to make it easy for people to delicious/digg/reddit my posts or the blog?

What are the little extra features on a blog that you really like to see included?

I'm having issues with my AddThis button on my blog.

bamassippi — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 12:13:49 -0800

I'm having issues with my AddThis button on my blog. So I'm trying to add the AddThis button to the front page of my blog so that readers can email/save/send individual blog posts, though it continues to save my homepage and the AddThis.com website is very unclear as to how to adjust the code.

I know that other readers may have experienced the same issues... how did you solve it? How should I adjust my code? (I'm using WordPress by the way.)

creating a flash video playlist widget

Dag Maggot — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:21:42 -0800

I'm trying to create a Flash based video playlist widget that looks something like this. I would describe myself as an intermediate Flash user, pretty well-versed with action script and creating UIs. I don't like creating things from scratch though, and I'm looking for libraries that would help me parse an RSS feed in Flash and any example code of displaying video players within another swf file. Any help?

Where have all the Dashboard stickies gone?

dereisbaer — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:09:48 -0800

Where have all the Dashboard stickies gone? Dashboard is misbehaving on my wife's MacBook (OSX 10.4.10). She went into Dashboard with F12 and all of the widgets were missing. I did the following:

Ran Preferential Treatment -- No problems reported
Examined ~/Library/Preferences/widget-com.apple.widget.stickies.plist with Property List Editor -- The contents of the stickies seem to still be there
Ran Disk Utility off the install DVD to repair permissions and check the file system -- A few permissions were fixed and FS came up clean
Renamed ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard*.plist -- Logged out and logged back in to find Dashboard reset to default widgets, but the contents of Stickies are still missing even if I add the widget.

Is there a way we can fix the Stickies widget at this point without manually re-entering everything?

Dynamic web widget examples please!

mtstover — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 07:29:08 -0800

Web usability gurus: I'm looking for a great example of web technology that takes a range input variables and demonstrates quickly what the outcome will be for the user. I'm thinking of something where you can dial up and down specific elements, and the output is shown immediately. I'm really looking for a good analogy for a company I'm working with that sells a financial product online. There are some key variables that the user has to decide on which effect the final price of the product. Compound this with the fact that these variables are hard to understand for the user, and they probably need some guidance for what the "typical" answer would be and why.

So any web widgets combining dynamic variable adjustment with explanation, recommendation and clear visibility of impact would be great.

Thanks so much in advance Hivemind!

How to make it easy for user to upload images, mp3s to a blog project site?

cortex — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 21:08:47 -0800

Good, free solutions for implementing super-easy userland image- and mp3-upload capability into a Wordpress-based blog project? I'm kicking around an idea for a participatory bloggish thing, and part of it involves letting users/participants upload images and mp3 files in as painless a fashion as possible. I'm pretty conversant in WP, basic PHP, and author-driven bloggery, but letting other folks push stuff onto a site easily is not familiar territory.

Are there any particularly good solutions for allowing reasonably secure uploads? Is this stupid easy? Hope me; I am a babe in the woods, here.

Good Widget Dashboard Setups

namespan — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 16:17:35 -0800

Looking for something for Windows and/or Mac OS X that allow you to invoke or otherwise mark off an area at the side of the screen with only widgets/applets/chiclets/whateverlets in them. It should be different from, say, the OS X dock, in that it should claim its screen real estate fully -- no letting things slide under it or over it, windows that bump up against it should recognize its edge and stop. See, I like widgets, but I'd like to have small, configurable space at the side of a screen for a few that are best kept visibly running at the edge of visual perception, rather than using a key or mouse shortcut. And it'd be nice if I could find a solution that didn't cause the kind of problems the OS X dock does with window management.

A utility that just marked certain pieces of screen real estate off-limits for all but a handful of applications (or any utility that otherwize prioritizes desktop space by application/window) would probably work best. This way, I could use whichever widgeting solution I like.

But I'm open to other ideas. And in fact, any discussion regarding creating desktop setup and dashboards that help facilitate workflow and the conveyance of information in some way similar to what I've described.

The text on all my Widgets (OS X) has become outlined. What do I do?

nramsey — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 14:17:32 -0800

The text on all my Widgets (OS X) has become outlined. I've cleared prefs, restarted, removed widgets, what else is there to do?