Developing a CD Dashboard Widget

[Kyle Fenton]

With the release of Tiger this week, I was thinking about all the new features, and how it will benefit me.

Then I was thinking about a cool idea to make a dashboard widget for Chiefdelphi. They don't seem that hard to make, and Apple has a webpage describing how to make them.

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html

I might make one, when I have the time after finals.

What are your suggestions on what a good widget would do, and what features you want in it.

[Brandon Martus]

At the bottom of my wish list is a 'whos online' type thing. Nate Smith was working on one, that was based off your 'CD Buddy List' found in your user CP (since it really isnt used). I have a file with that information (whos online, off, etc) available, if you want to do something that notifies users when their buddies are on CD.

[scitobor 617]

This whole Dashboard business reminds me a lot of SuperKaramba (http://www.linuxjournal.com/articles/lj/0121/7417/7417f1.png) ! But with all Linux bias aside i think a good widget would need to show new threads or replies to threads that you recently posted in. Maybe even alert you to a PM. Would be helpful if CD had an RSS feed, I think RSS parsing would be easier than HTML parsing.

[Brandon Martus]

This whole Dashboard business reminds me a lot of SuperKaramba (http://www.linuxjournal.com/articles/lj/0121/7417/7417f1.png) ! But with all Linux bias aside i think a good widget would need to show new threads or replies to threads that you recently posted in. Maybe even alert you to a PM. Would be helpful if CD had an RSS feed, I think RSS parsing would be easier than HTML parsing.
Theres some RSS feeds here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/extras.php?

[dubious elise]

Hmm, I'd like to see quotes in the widget, along with say, the most recently uploaded picture, most recent UFH winner and the top 2-3 most recently active threads (the user can pick which forum[s] they come from).

Sorta like this... It is a bit fuzzy and not GUI-ed at all, but it gets the point across :)

[Brandon Martus]

Whatever you do decide to do, I will make any XML (or whatever you need) available to make it work so you won't have to parse HTMML that will most likely change.