After a busy week, with a lot of things happening, Apple and their iPhone, the tons of gadgets and hi-def stuff at CES, see, it was almost impossible to be up to date with all of that.
Anyway, as usual, while surfing on the web, I found a really cool article. It was a tutorial explaining how to create a dashboard widget with a tool called Dashcode Beta, which can be downloaded for free. Then I thought to myself, that is a cool thing to do here for my blog, I had 2 feeds, and why not?
Following the article and using the dashcode makes the process really smooth. Basically you choose what sort of widget you want (RSS, Podcast, Gauge...), and then you start editing. The interface is pretty simple, I don't want to explain in details how to do everything because the tutorial already does that. The only think that I want is to show what I did.
Choosing what widget you want
Essentially what I did was change the basic model with images and CSS. My idea was a widget with a cool header, like the forecast one, where the images of the sun and clouds extrapolate the borders of the widget. Looking for inspiration I searched the word "abduction" at google images and got some images to fresh my mind.
Searching images for inspiration
With the subject of abduction in mind and tons of images seen, I started doing the image of the header.
The header's design, with alpha transparency
The basic idea of the widget is show my blog's content, so it must follow the design of the site. To achieve that it uses the same background and shares the same color palette and typography.
Abduzeedo's design
Another thing that I was willing to do was to create an option where the user would be able to choose the feed that he would like to read, in my case the Blog and the Sideblog's feed. Messing around with some "js" files I came up with a solution, if you are a ninja, probably, you will feel far more comfortable than I doing that.
Clicking on that button and it will show the blog's feed, instead of the sideblog's
After a couple of hours the result was pretty satisfactory, below you can see the abduweedget among the others in my dashboard, you can even download it as an example and, perhaps, sometime do yours.
The Abduweedget in my dashboard
Below a list of links related to this article:
- Developing Dashboard Widgets
- Build a Dashboard Widget
- Sample Code: Apple Applications: Dashboard
- How to make your own Dashboard Widget with Dashcode
