Dashcode Beta
January 07, 2007
When Tiger first came out, I wasn’t a huge fan of the dashboard. While the concept was good I found it a struggle to find widgets that functioned how I wanted and in the end, I turned it off on my iBook (saving a lot of ram in the process).
It was a frustration that I couldn’t make my own widgets, partly because I just didn’t have the technical know how, but mostly because I lacked the patience, to put together something half-way decent. The Dashcode beta however has changed that completely and now putting together widgets that display RSS feeds, count down to dates and those sorts of things takes a matter of minutes!
Last night I actually put one together to display the latest entries from my RSS feed. It’s simple and it doesn’t deviate too much from the template given at the start, but it was quite fun to make and because the whole process is very visual you don’t need any programming knowledge at all.
I only made it for a bit of fun but if you want to check my widget out it’s available here
Dashcode is still slightly buggy (with some image layers turning invisible until they’re resized for example), but it’s certainly worth checking out if you’ve ever wanted to have a dabble with making your own widget. If you get more comfortable you can of course start with a clean slate and build any widget you like through the interface.
Grab the Dashcode Beta
Feedback?
If you’ve found errors or have some feedback please . Comments aren’t currently enabled due to spam but I’m sure they’ll return in the future.