The Flip Side 11.27.2006

The host of a podcast called "The Flipside" talks about various widgets in this episode. He discusses the Solar View Widget, the Optical Illusion Widget, the Volkswagen Rabbit Widget, and Widget Top. He also mentions widget creation software called WCode and Widgetarium. The host expresses his disappointment in the lack of Thanksgiving-related widgets and encourages listeners to develop some. The episode concludes with an interview with the creator of the Snatch It and Snatch Em widgets, which allow for easy file downloading from the internet. Monday November 27th 2006 episode 24. Welcome to the flipside with John Brown Hi, welcome to the flipside. I'm your host John Brown. I'd like to thank you for downloading and listening and also for those of you who have stayed subscribed during my long absence. During the absence I have been trying to settle in to life as usual here in America. I have been working overseas as an English teacher for many years and now I am back in the United States trying to get computer work and what not. I'd like to thank you all for your emails and support. They are greatly appreciated. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday and I hope you all have a great Christmas holiday as that is fast approaching. Now let's dive right into the widget news because during the time that I was away there were lots of things happening in the world of widgets so let's just jump right in and get started. While I was away for that short amount of time I had lots of emails for people wanting me to review their widgets so we got a few widget reviews to do. The first widget that I'd like to review is called the Solar View Widget. Now this is a really great widget. The Solar View Widget allows you to see today's images of the sun on your computer. These near real time images come from NASA's SOHO missions, NASA TRACE satellite and the Big Bear Observatory. A Mac OS X dashboard widget was designed and developed along with a Yahoo widget that works on both Mac and PC. The Yahoo widget developed in early 2006 has received over 80,000 downloads combined. The widget is based on the Sun Earth Connection Media Viewer, a flash based interactive application developed with NASA in 2004. This is a really great widget for all of you out there who are into astronomy or just looking at really cool images of outer space in the dashboard. Again this also works with the Yahoo widget engine. Really great widget. Download it and check it out. There will be a link to it in the show notes. The next widget I'd like to review is called the Optical Illusion Widget. Now this widget has been one of my favorite widgets for a long time. I have it on my dashboard. I use it a lot. Really interesting way to pass the time in your dashboard. Okay, so basically what it is, is it's an optical illusion in a dashboard widget. It automatically updates itself. The widget pulls the latest illusion from the website and shows the optical illusion of the day on your dashboard. The design is much better than the previous design so if you have an older version of this widget, it has been updated. You might want to download the newest version and it's a bit more user friendly. If you are using the old version, be sure to update it and you can find the link to the Optical Illusion Widget again in the show notes. Another great widget that was released recently is the Volkswagen Rabbit Widget and what this widget does is it's a Volkswagen branded downloadable widget that pipes in local events and activities. It's persistent, branded, and it is designed for Volkswagen enthusiasts. So if you're into Volkswagen news and you want the latest Volkswagen information coming to you with a really great cool Volkswagen Rabbit Widget, then try this out. There's a link in the show notes. Widget Factor has just updated WCode, it's widget creation software suite. WCode 2.0 looks better and runs smoother than ever. It's new and improved template system allows anyone to design, share, and download their own templates. So this is much better than say Dash Code or some other programs that have been floating around on the net that allows you to make a couple widgets from their own templates. This widget creation software allows you to make your own templates and share them with others. So if you make something really cool, then you can share it with others. I think that's a really good idea. You can now preview your widgets right inside WCode. You no longer have to export them, preview them in Dash in the Dashboard environment, and then go back to WCode. It's all inclusive. It's right there, which is nice. The search bar functionality has also been revamped. Now with a thorough search of every file you have opened in a title search of the ones you haven't. Download WCode 2.0 and enjoy a tremendous increase in performance and stability. Designing the perfect widget has never been easier. I highly recommend using WCode. I always have and I use it myself. If you're out there and you're interested in making widgets and you're frustrated with some of the other options out there, WCode 2.0 is a really nice option. Another great option is a really great widget creation software called Widgetarium. Widgetarium was developed by Glenn Andreas and that is also a very great, highly flexible and versatile widget creation software package. So again, check those two out. There will be a link to those in the show notes. The last thing in widget news today that I wanted to mention is a service called Widget Top. Now I know I mentioned Widget Top before. Basically what it is, it's the dashboard in your internet browser so now you can enjoy widgets anywhere in the world on any platform in the world right in your browser and it looks and feels just like the OS X dashboard. A lot of dashboard widgets have already been ported over to the system and if you have a dashboard widget that you would like to see on Widget Top, simply submit it and they'll even alter it for you so that you can have it on the site. It's a really great service and the reason I'm mentioning it again is because it now works with Safari. Before it only worked with Firefox or a Firefox compatible browser such as Mozilla or Opera. Now it works with Safari so it's much more user-friendly. If anyone is interested in checking it out, you can go to www.widgettop.com. That's widgettop.com, W-I-D-G-E-T-O-P. Again, there will be a link in the show notes. They've also got a really great developer section so if you want to develop for them, it's free. You can have your own widget in Widget Top. Again, it's a really cool service and I think it's really going to broaden the horizons of the dashboard in the future. I know the Thanksgiving season has already come and gone and I hope you guys all had a great holiday. Now, the one thing that was a little bit disappointing to me though was that we were finding a lot of Christmas widgets and the next show is going to be devoted to different widgets that you have to decorate your dashboard for the Christmas season. However, there aren't many decorative or even functional Thanksgiving related widgets for your dashboard and this is bringing me to something that has really been plaguing me for a couple of years now is the fact that we're, as a society, slowly phasing Christmas in as a much different and bigger holiday than it really is and phasing Thanksgiving out as a holiday that is less meaningful as Christmas only because it doesn't bring in as many sales. You can't really merchandise off Thanksgiving all that much. I really like to see some Thanksgiving related widgets come out for next year so I put it out to you guys. If you have any ideas to make the dashboard a much more festive place for the months approaching up to Thanksgiving then develop something because I'm sure that there are lots of people out there that are wondering where did Thanksgiving go? It's a great holiday and I really enjoy it. Sometimes a little bit more than Christmas itself so I just wanted to put that out to you. That's it for my rant about Thanksgiving. Thank you. All right and finally to the featured widget of the day. There are actually two of them. The Snatch It and Snatch Em widgets which allow you to download files from all over the internet in one simple click. It's a great widget backed by a great function. I was simply sick of dealing with pages with loads of media files or links to files and wanted the ability to quickly download all the files referred to on a page both inline and linked to. Do you recognize any of these situations? You get a page that is basically a folder view with a hundred links to files and have to have no way to know which one is which and have to click every one of them and download every file one at a time by control right click save file as control right click save file as. Or this, you get a web page with an inline video and you want to download it. Unfortunately there is no way of downloading the video straight from the page which forces you to go into the source and start looking for the file name. Or how about this, you enter a gallery full of images and you want to save them to your hard drive. All of them being forced to right control click and download them one by one. I was in all of these situations all the time and the solution is for a Mac OS X dashboard widget that used the XMLHttpRequest object which we've talked about before in the show in JavaScript's download source. Regular expressions to find the file references and the terminal program. Curl built into BSD and OS X to download the individual files. So basically this is a really great widget that accomplishes something that frustrates a lot of us Mac users all the time and it's the ability to download files from the internet quickly and easily. So we had a opportunity to sit down with the creator of these great widgets and ask him a few questions about what he did, what was the inspiration for and everything behind creating these widgets. So without further ado, here is the interview. Hi, this is Robin Gavin, the creator of SnapChimp, participating in this podcast from Berlin. Hi Robin, it's nice to have you here on the show and thank you for agreeing to talk to us today. Do you have any comments about what inspired you to create this widget? I know we already went over the basic features and the reasons why you made it, but were there any other reasons that made you really compelled and inspired to make the widget like this? I wouldn't say that anything inspired me really. I have this theory that everything that's created comes from either inspiration or frustration and sometimes both. And in this case it was mainly frustration, the fact that there wasn't any good procedure for just downloading multiple files from a webpage and that was basically it. That's true, I totally agree with you and I do think that a lot of widgets are made to make people's lives a lot easier, which is why people love dashboard widgets because they're small, they're easy to load and they can do a lot and make your life that much easier. Why do you think that this widget has become so successful? One of the reasons I think is the fact that there isn't a lot of widgets out there that are straightforward and useful. A lot of widgets are scaled down versions of websites and can easily be replaced by an RSS feed and some widgets are just a small version of an application really. I think the widget I created was intended for a purpose and the dashboard was the right tool for that. Another reason I think is the fact that the design is what it is. My personal opinion is that the designer is never better than his illustrations and in this case I chose to work with a designer called Morten Mundin in Stockholm, which is a great illustrator and I think I have a lot to thank him for that the widget is so successful just because of him. Yeah, that's true, I really do like the illustration of the little snatched monster. It's really great and it does add a lot of appeal to the widget even though it's not directly related to the widget in any real way. So I do believe the design is equally as important as the function and I think that your design compliments the functionality very well. Do you have any advice for any first time widget developers that are out there wondering what to do for their first widget? It's a good idea to keep it simple. Even the simplest widget will involve complications and it's always a good motivator to be able to finish that first widget just to get some feedback. Another thing that I learned was that the localization is harder than you think. You just think that you can do it in your natural language and then apply different language settings but it turns out it's not that simple. Like for the Snatchtion, I was applying some languages and when I got to the Finnish language, which is a pretty long language, I realized that to be able to get the Finnish words into the widget, I would have to redo the whole design to make it work. So I think it's really worth thinking about if you really want to localize it to different languages. Think about the design before you start applying any source of localization. Yeah, I do agree with you and I think a lot of people really have to take into account the design factor so they jump right into the coding and I think that's a really important thing to talk about and to discuss. Thank you for bringing it up. The next thing I wanted to ask is what do you think about the dashboard environment itself? It's a young platform and many people are just starting to develop for it and what do you think about it as far as the future of the dashboard environment is concerned? I don't really know to be honest with you. The thing is, I try to look at all the technologies as solutions to problems really. So I tend to always pick the right solution and the right tool for the right problem, if you know what I mean. And sometimes it's AppleScript, sometimes it's just plain server-side scripting like PHP and sometimes it's Automator and sometimes it's Python and whatever. And yeah, who knows? Sometimes in the near future, you know, the dashboard might be the right tool for whatever problem or ideas I have and yeah, we'll see. Yeah, I agree. I think that most people should look at this in a respect that these are tools that we're talking about means to getting jobs done and so when you put it in that respect, it's really important to look at it that way. The last question I have for you is, do you have any last words and comments or bits of advice for us about the dashboard before we leave? I think it's important to find the right balance and to remember that the dashboard is like a grey area somewhere between the application and the webpage and a simple script really. And some people just plan to do widgets and then try to come up with an idea and I think it's kind of like buying a hammer and then just walking around your apartment looking for something to use your hammer on. And I don't think that's the right way to go about. I think you should come up with ideas and then just pick the right tool for it. And the widget is, the dashboard is a wonderful platform for doing a lot of things, but first things first. Thanks Robin, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk to us today. Can you tell us where we can find your site and also download your great widgets? Alright, thanks for having me on this podcast and I hope I said something valuable to someone. And if anybody's ever in Berlin and wants a grand talk, please contact me. Alright, bye. Alright, thanks again to Robin for that great interview. It was really great talking to you again. Robin's contact information is in the show notes. You can find the show notes and any links that we talked about in the show at www.widgetshow.com. And become an active part of user discussions over at the widget forum. You can locate that at forum.widgetshow.com. And if you have any problems or questions, they can be answered there. If you have any comments for the show, you can call our hotline at 206-333-0417. That's 206-333-0417. As soon as you call, you'll be prompted to record a message. All messages recorded will be sent to me via email in MP3 format and we'll include them into the show. If you have any questions or audio comments that you'd like to email us, you can email them to widgetshow.gmail.com. Also, if you are so kind, please write a review for us on iTunes. Go to iTunes, search for The Flipside and tell us what you think about the show. Also, vote for us on Podcast Alley and help grow our wonderful widget community. Thank you for downloading and listening. Have a great holiday season everyone and I'll talk to you next time on The Flipside. Music .