Tue 13 Jun 2006
So it’s been nearly five months since I’ve posted anything. The biggest reason is that I have a new job now and I’m working more hours and traveling less. Which is unfortunate for you all because I did most of my widget development while logging hours in the passenger seat of transcontinental and transpacific airline flights. Now I would kill to have a solid five hour stretch of uninterrupted computer time (and with no Internet connection either because I’d get too distracted). But none of this matters to YOU, so here’s the status of everything.
1. GuitarChords - As a Dashboard widget, I think this is pretty solid and I’m probably not going to do much else to it aside from the occasional maintenance release. Most of my future efforts with this widget will be put into creating a port of it for Konfabulator or other new platforms like mobile phones.
2. UpcomingBirthdays - This widget is kind of stuck now. There’s a bug (commonly reported) about birthdays appearing a day early or a day late, and I haven’t been able to come up with a solid solution. The issue has to do with the “time” that a birthday occurs. I’ve noticed that the exact time of your birthday varies depending on a) which version of OS X you were using when you created the entry, b) which time zone you were in when you created the entry, and c) which time zone you’re currently in now. Any of these can cause the birthdays to appear up to 12 hours off hence the reason why sometimes they appear as “yesterday” or “tomorrow”.
The sad reality though is that I’m not sure how useful the UpcomingBirthdays widget is when there are other built in ways in OS X to accomplish the same thing. I hope to write more about this in a future post, but right now the easiest way to do this is to create a SmartGroup in the AddressBook program and voila, you have a more configurable view of upcoming birthdays, anniversaries, and other dates in the AddressBook.
That’s fine and all for some of you, but others like the immediacy of Dashboard. For those users, one possible solution is to use Automator. You can easily set up a system in Automator to work with iCals built-in birthday calendar to act as a system wide alarm for UpcomingBirthdays. So you could have your own computer send you an email once a day containing UpcomingBirthdays.
My point is that unlike GuitarChords, the UpcomingBirthdays widget isn’t a unique solution to a problem, it’s just a customized view of something you can get several other ways from OS X. Plus, it’s a widget that could never be ported to Windows, Konfabulator or any other platform, so the reasons to keep pushing its boundaries aren’t that compelling to me. I know some of you might say that’s the EXACT reason to keep developing it, but I’m not entirely convinced.
3. The Future of The Trove - I do plan to keep posting to the Trove. Five months without an update is just unacceptable, and there’s nothing anyone hates more than a dead site or an RSS feed that never (or rarely) comes to life. So I will probably start posting more things here. They will definitely be related to technology and software development. For instance, I have recently started playing around with Lifeblog, and posting directly to Flickr and Blogger directly from my mobile phone. And today I installed a new program called Widsets that shows a lot of promise.
But more on that later.