So, I recently got a Mac, and being as enamored with Javascript as I am, of course I started making myself some Dashboard widgets. I just finished the first one:

http://wakaba.c3.cx/releases/mac/AlarmClock.zip

It's an iTunes alarm clock. It'll just start iTunes playing a playlist you pick at a given time, slowly fading up the volume. It should be pretty obvious how to use it.

The alarm will recover after a restart. If the widget wasn't running at the time of an earlier set alarm, it will trigger immediately. At the moment, it can't schedule a power-up for wake from sleep for your Mac. I haven't quite figured out how to do that, but if anyone wants it, I'll find out and add it.

Needless to say, don't gamble your job or academic career on such relatively untested software as this. It's woken me up a couple of times, but I make no gurantees. Keep a spare alarm until any possible bugs have been shaken out.

I figure I'll be making more of these things, and I'll post them in this thread later on. Enjoy!

The graphics don't seem to be working right on my Mac (1.5 GHz Powerbook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.1); see http://www.magnesium.net/~dag/kibo/src/1118374152834.png for screenshot. I tried reloading but no go.

This is strange. If I preview alarm.html the images seem to show up right. The images certainly all seem to be in the right place ...

I will continue to fiddle with this.

My Mac appears to be acting weird currently, so I am probably not a good test case, unless other people who use the widget also start having weird Mac problems. I will revisit this once my Mac problems are fixed.

This reminds me though, I've been meaning to enable images on this board. You can now use this to post screenshots and other relevant things!

...which of course I, too, can use to post screenshots. Here's what the thing looks like.

Oops, looks like >>2 is actually a bug.

I fixed that, and I made it possible to launch several alarm widgets at the same time and have them use different wakeup times.

http://wakaba.c3.cx/releases/mac/AlarmClock_1.1.zip

I also made what I like to think of as the most useless widget ever - I was meaning to make a weather station data visualizer, and then I started thinking about the Ambient Orb and then things got out of hand and I started playing with the <canvas> object, and well... It's the Shiny Orb!

http://wakaba.c3.cx/releases/mac/ShinyOrb.zip

Shiny orb is fun, and alarm clock now works. Cool!

OUR ONE MOUSE BUTTON LIFESTYLE SHALL CONQUER

I'd try these out, but I don't want to run Dashboard until it stops using 20+MB memory per widget.

Inspired (and also nagged) by !WAHa, I wrote my own useless widget; it's available at http://kontext-away.com/Accu.tar.gz (it'll probably move to a slightly different location if I ever update it). It lets you keep an eye on Accuweather's wacky weather maps (double-clicking on the maps brings you to the appropriate story on Accuweather's web site). Enjoy, crazy people!

>>10

Shiny Orb will run just fine on its own in Safari, and be just as useless as on the Dashboard!

Also I use a four-button mouse.

> I'd try these out, but I don't want to run Dashboard until it stops using 20+MB memory per widget.

People claim this has been fixed in 10.4.2. Try it out.

I've been using it for a while now, actually, although I'm not very hardcore because I only have four widgets (Tiger-tan, LEO German-English Dictionary, Shiny Orb, and my attempt at a dict.regex.info interface which I always forget to work on).

And yeah, they only use ~7MB now.

A thread over in /b/ got this idea stuck in my head, and there was no way around it: A Laughing Man widget. This one is just as useless as Shiny Orb. It just sits there and spins.

The main feature is the obsessive attention to detail! I traced the image off a Production IG image, and I've even got the text working right - the real Laughing Man logo doesn't have a simple rotating ring of text, as most people believe, it has a scrolling text that continuously appears and disappears on the right side, and doesn't match up.

Enjoy!

Hmm, that transparent PNG didn't look very good when thumbnailed. Oh well.

...and I could, I suppose, include an actual link to it: http://wakaba.c3.cx/releases/mac/LaughingMan.zip

Just downloaded and can't get it to work even after restart. Please post again. Looks like a great idea if you can make it work. Thanks.

Hmm? Which one, >>18? It's worked fine for others, and for me. Can you open up Console and see if it says anything when you try and launch it?

Something that would be quite cool: Text field, in which a song name could be typed to spotlight search for it & play in iTunes. Would probably work for artist names too, without any extra effort on the programmer's part (although the resulting songset should be played via "advance track" rather then "play", so that shuffle isn't disregarded.)

I've seen an AppleScript that does this, but not a widget.

Are these mac onry? :(

Until somebody makes a Dashboard implementation for some other platform, yes.

You got pimped here: http://www.dstation.net/modules/mydownloads/index.php

Huh. I wonder how they found out. Did Apple finally add me to their list or something?

(They added my screensavers right away, and even pimped LotsaSnow as a featured download, but they were lazy with the widgets.)

I also notice they all use their own screen shots with different times set up. They are actually running the software and screenshotting it! This is more than I expected.

Your company's name is circleSoft? Is this some sort of pun?

Old name, related to various friends and stuff. No real meaning to it that makes sense outside that group. Apple apparently thinks that if you write software, you MUST BE A COMPANY, so I had to put in something.

I want lauging man on windooooows D:

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I have used the Alarm Clock widget without any problem but once I upgraded to iTunes 5.0 it stopped working...WHY and is this being fixed??

THANKS

That's strange - I upgraded to iTunes 5.0 too, but it seems to be working just fine here. What happens? Does the playlist selector on the back work?

"At the moment, it can't schedule a power-up for wake from sleep for your Mac. I haven't quite figured out how to do that, but if anyone wants it, I'll find out and add it."

Why wouldn't anyone want it to power up when asleep. In fact this could be one of the best widgets ever if it woke up the computer, as it is it is totally useless.

When will Alarm clock wake from sleep as it is useless otherwise?

I keep my computer on all the time, so I don't need that feature. And as I said, I don't quite know how to make it power the computer up. There's also the fact that Dashboard isn't started when the computer powers up, so it'd have to install some furhter startup items to work.

If anyone has any information about how to implement this, I'd be happy to do so, but until then I don't really have any way to do it.

>>34

Look into pmset.

>>35

There's still the problem that dashboard doesn't start after a power-on. I'd need to install some alternate timer mechanism that can start the alarm (the computer might get powered off and then on before the alarm is due, too, without the dashboard being opened).

Then look into launchd, too. Although I don't know if it can actually do that, if nothing else can it can't either.

Seriously. Laughing man. Windows.

>>38
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

>>16

THANK YOU.

Anybody who wants to make a laughing man logo for Windows is welcome to use the graphics from >>16 for it. The files are available in the zip as PNGs.

Also, >>16 just uses Javascript and the <canvas> object. With a little bit of luck it'll work in Firefox 1.5, which is supposed to have <canvas> support.