A Project People Actually Use
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When Mac OS X 10.4 came out, Apple introduced a new feature called Dashboard, which is a program to run widgets, small programs to display information or perform simple tasks. I decided I wanted to design a widget to display animated weather maps and so I took a look at the work involved (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) and wrote the widget Radar In Motion.
Websites have popped up all over the internet for developers to upload their widgets so other users can benefit from them, including Apple’s own list. On that page, they keep track of the most downloaded widgets. Well, today the most downloaded widget is mine! It has been downloaded more than 80,000 times since I posted it in the end of June. I’ve written a few in the past and made them available, only to have no one really use them and someone else design much better versions of the same thing. Now I’ve designed a useful program that I enjoy maintaining and that not only I use (now that I have added enough RAM to my computer to make Dashboard usable), but that other people seem to want. Maybe now I can actually call myself a computer scientist. |
July 11th, 2005 at 2:10 pm
Congratulations! I knew you’d write something useful one of these days — although I myself have found several of your past projects useful. But seriously, way to go with an amazingly useful widget (from what I can see of it anyway). Yet another reason to switch to Mac upon my graduation by / release from law school.
Am I right in reading that list as being just today’s top downloads, and not a cumulative download record? I guess your server logs would give you an idea of your installed (or at least downloaded) base, but it would be cool if Apple had some sort of usage tracking ability, showing the top ten most-used widgets. But I suppose that would raise some troubling privacy concerns.
I’d love to see you pull the data straight from the NOAA, just to spite Sen. Santorum.
July 17th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
I have installed many widgets without problems, but for the the RadarInMotion widget, I keep getting the message from Stuffit Expander: “An error has occurred while expanding the file “RadarInMotion.wdgt.zip” (Tried to position before start of file). Error #-40
After many attempts to download with this message, I think there is something corrupt in the file, which I would love to download and use.
July 17th, 2005 at 12:56 pm
Hi there. Well, I’ve been trying to download your widget, as I think it would be useful to me, but have been unable to do so for a few days. What’s happening is that when I download it, the size indicates that it’s a 141K file, and from the Apple website I see that it should be 60K. Needless to say, when it downloads the 60K it tries to decompress and fails. I’ve tried with Safari 2.0, Internet Explorer 5.2.2 for Mac, and Netscape 7.2. I was going to try others, but since they all say the file is 141K, I don’t think the problem is the browser. Any suggestions? Have you had other people tell you this? Or am I an isolated ocurrence? If at all, maybe you could email me the file. Thanks.
July 17th, 2005 at 1:21 pm
As with the previous two comments, I would also like to try out Radar in Motion. However, I am also experiencing a corrupt .zip archive. The download indicates that it is 141K in size, when the site says it is 60K. I get to about 90.2K before the download mysteriously “completes”, and then I get the decompression failure.
Could you please look into this?
July 18th, 2005 at 5:37 am
Ditto comments 2-4. I have attempted download 5 times from different hotlinks and this website. The download never gets all the way to 60 kbytes but has quit at various smaller sizes even though Safari DL pane says 141 kbytes.Get Stuffit Deluxe (7.0.3) error 2 - No such file or directory.
Zipit will not start expansion saying that the archive is defective or multidisk.
July 18th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
No problems with my download of RiM 0.7, which I got direct from your site yesterday after reading reports of problems with the file on VersionTracker.
Very nice work, indeed. Much preferable to going to weather.com’s site and waiting for the ads to finish loading, and IMO easier to ‘read’ at a glance than NOAA’s feeds (sorry, Justin - although I agree with the sentiment about the good Senator). My only feature request would be the ability to have it full screen, or to set the size percentage to a value that would do the same. Not being a developer, I have no idea of the effort that would take, so feel free to roll your eyes and say “Yeah, right.”
Keep up the great work!
July 19th, 2005 at 10:15 am
Having an app that people use is a great thing, but don’t confuse that with being a computer scientist. Many CS folks don’t even program! If you want to write software, you want to learn CS, but apply it (as an engineer or developer). Staying in CS means theory, experimentation, proposal writing, and basically never writing code for someone else to use (unless it’s an experimental tool - and even then, most of us hire an engineer to do that).
July 19th, 2005 at 9:29 pm
Well, my comment about being a computer scientist was really meant to be a joke, given that I am a graduate student in computer science at Cornell University….
July 19th, 2005 at 11:55 pm
I’m getting the same zip expansion problem as others. Any ideas?
Thanks
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:12 am
Aren’t widgets ‘platform independent’? I can’t seem to get RiM to run in the Windows Konfabulator environment. Anyone have it running there?