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kman42 · Jul 2, 2004, 12:55 PM

Anyone know what the winning gadget is?

kman

gorickey · Jul 2, 2004, 12:59 PM

Do you mean the "Apple Design Award" winners?

Socially Awkward Solo · Jul 2, 2004, 01:08 PM

I thought they well all sorta gay.

cybergoober · Jul 2, 2004, 01:09 PM

There is (was?) a competition for the best Dashboard widget (gadget? - which is it?) this week at WWDC.

osxisfun · Jul 2, 2004, 01:14 PM

i think he means the one where apple was going to give away a powerbook for the best new gadget.

lookmark · Jul 2, 2004, 01:31 PM

Originally posted by gorickey:
Do you mean the "Apple Design Award" winners?

No, I believe there was a separate, AdHoc-style contest for creating a Dashboard widget...

kman42 · Jul 2, 2004, 02:36 PM

Yes, I was speaking of the Dashboard Gadget contest.

BTW, despite what Steve said, I think the proper term is gadget, not widget as gadget is the term used everywhere else. Of course, that is subject to change w/o notice due to the pre-release nature of the software.

kman

zachs · Jul 2, 2004, 02:46 PM

Originally posted by kman42:
Yes, I was speaking of the Dashboard Gadget contest.

BTW, despite what Steve said, I think the proper term is gadget, not widget as gadget is the term used everywhere else. Of course, that is subject to change w/o notice due to the pre-release nature of the software.

kman

Do they have anything about it online? I couldn't find anything at developer.apple.com.

goMac · Jul 2, 2004, 05:27 PM

The entries are due today. I wouldn't expect an announcement until tonight.

piracy · Jul 2, 2004, 08:52 PM

http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/dashboard.html

gorickey · Jul 2, 2004, 08:58 PM

Originally posted by piracy:
http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/dashboard.html

Cool stuff.

MacGorilla · Jul 2, 2004, 10:20 PM

Where's one for Othello?

zachs · Jul 2, 2004, 11:22 PM

Originally posted by piracy:
http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/dashboard.html

Neat! Too bad they aren't up for download, though.

kman42 · Jul 3, 2004, 10:14 AM

I love to see two students win the contest. It just bodes well for the platform. It's also nifty that they incorporated the gnu game engine under the hood; it's a nice demonstration of how to take existing apps and put a Gadget front-end on them. We are going to have a gazillion Gadgets by the time Tiger is released. I've already thought of several ideas. I just wish I new JS, HTML, and still had developer access (it was easy when I was a student, but since I am only a hobbyist/own-use programmer it isn't practical anymore).

kman

ryju · Jul 3, 2004, 11:19 AM

I liked the iTunes one, but maybe not so bulky.

ShotgunEd · Jul 3, 2004, 11:50 AM

How confusing, the WWDC preview calls the widgets, gadgets, and steve called the gadgets, widgets. Maybe they changed the name between builds...

Fonzie · Jul 3, 2004, 05:04 PM

I think we should just call these dashboard "apps"; Ding-dongs

That would clear up some confusion.

Chuckit · Jul 3, 2004, 08:51 PM

Originally posted by ShotgunEd:
How confusing, the WWDC preview calls the widgets, gadgets, and steve called the gadgets, widgets. Maybe they changed the name between builds...

Steve called them widgets, and the Apple PR page calls them widgets. I kind of wonder if maybe there was a change once they realized that people had drawn a connection between "widget" and Konfabulator.

cacarr1 · Jul 4, 2004, 12:51 AM

Originally posted by Socially Awkward Solo:
I thought they well all sorta gay.

Aren't you gay? Are you saying that all the gadgets are cool? Or not cool?
Just curious...

Lancer409 · Jul 4, 2004, 06:51 AM

lol.. just port over the konfab widgets .. and if not, just make a bunch that look like 'em =P .. i liked a bunch of konfabulator's widgets .. i just didnt wanna pay 25 bux for such a thing...

Chuckit · Jul 4, 2004, 07:26 AM

Originally posted by cacarr1:
Aren't you gay? Are you saying that all the gadgets are cool? Or not cool?

He's just making an objective statement about the gadgets' preferences for other gadgets.

Carl Norum · Jul 5, 2004, 01:23 PM

Originally posted by MacGorilla:
Where's one for Othello?

!!! You have no idea how hilarious that is! Chris said he wanted to write a Go game, so I said "Sure, let's grab the source for GNU Go and get to it!". We had a major communication breakdown about halfway through writing when I told him to put the pieces on the intersections of the lines instead of inside the squares. He thought we were writing Othello!

Not that I'm complaining. The gadget looks awesome, and it won us a powerbook, which is for sure better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

-- Carl

Carl Norum · Jul 5, 2004, 01:26 PM

Originally posted by zachs:
Neat! Too bad they aren't up for download, though.

Goboard will be up by the end of the week. We spoke to the runner-up, a nice japanese guy, when we picked up our prizes, and he said his would be posted as well. Apple Legal wouldn't allow screenshots, since it has the baseball team's logo incorporated with the gadget. It's a pretty neat little thing - but probably not useful unless you are a japanese baseball fan.

-- Carl

Diggory Laycock · Jul 5, 2004, 02:15 PM

Many Congrats Carl - Are you going to cut the PB in half?

Carl Norum · Jul 5, 2004, 03:36 PM

We haven't discussed the prize very much yet, we are still shocked that we won! From what I saw at the conference, there should be some neat gadgets available when Tiger ships. I'm not so sure on a personal level that this Dashboard thing is such a good idea, but we'll have to see what happens.

-- Carl

zachs · Jul 5, 2004, 05:19 PM

Originally posted by Carl Norum:
Goboard will be up by the end of the week. We spoke to the runner-up, a nice japanese guy, when we picked up our prizes, and he said his would be posted as well. Apple Legal wouldn't allow screenshots, since it has the baseball team's logo incorporated with the gadget. It's a pretty neat little thing - but probably not useful unless you are a japanese baseball fan.

-- Carl

Congrats! Can't wait to download them. I wanna check out how they made the baseball one, and see if I can't figure out how to make a Yankees one from that.

kman42 · Jul 5, 2004, 05:22 PM

Originally posted by zachs:
Congrats! Can't wait to download them. I wanna check out how they made the baseball one, and see if I can't figure out how to make a Yankees one from that.

I've always wanted someone to make a baseball scores dockling, but I haven't seen one. A gadget would be even better. If you get it working for the Yankees it should be hard to add all of the teams (even other sports).

kman

zachs · Jul 5, 2004, 05:25 PM

Originally posted by kman42:
I've always wanted someone to make a baseball scores dockling, but I haven't seen one. A gadget would be even better. If you get it working for the Yankees it should be hard to add all of the teams (even other sports).

kman

There must be a way to get them. It uses JavaScript, and all the scores are here.

Carl Norum · Jul 5, 2004, 05:36 PM

I can't see that it would be super difficult to do for any sport or anything like that. Most sports web pages are going to provide you an RSS feed, which makes your parsing easy, or even better maybe you can set up some kind of SOAP thing to do it all. The Tigers widget that was the runner up had some other neat features; it plays the official song of the team, and lots of its code gets downloaded and run through XML so the widget on your computer is a lot smaller and more easily updated by the developer.

-- Carl

fuzzy · Jul 5, 2004, 08:54 PM

Hey Folks!

It's Chris Mullens here from the GoBoard duo.

Originally posted by MacGorilla:
Where's one for Othello?

Soon enough. When I get some time, I am going to make an OBoard or Dashello

Funny story about Othello... well, I guess Carl sums it up best:

Originally posted by Carl Norum:
!!! You have no idea how hilarious that is! Chris said he wanted to write a Go game, so I said "Sure, let's grab the source for GNU Go and get to it!". We had a major communication breakdown about halfway through writing when I told him to put the pieces on the intersections of the lines instead of inside the squares. He thought we were writing Othello!

Heh. In my defense, I had played Othello on and off for a long time. When I migrated over to OS X and started doing Cocoa development, I searched for UNIX/C engines, but came up short.

Frequenting slashdot led me to many articles and posts on the game Go. I had never played a game myself, but had read briefly on how it was played and mostly the difficulties creating an AI for the game. I was more interested in the Chess Vs. Go complexity debates than the game itself. It's Othello that I like to play.

When it came time to program a widget, I brainstormed a LOT, and made a shortlist of things I'd like to do. I knew the GNUGo engine was out there from hunting for Othello way back, so I proposed it to Carl. I still had Othello in my head, however, up until the GUI debacle.

Originally posted by kman42:
I love to see two students win the contest. It just bodes well for the platform. It's also nifty that they incorporated the gnu game engine under the hood; it's a nice demonstration of how to take existing apps and put a Gadget front-end on them. We are going to have a gazillion Gadgets by the time Tiger is released. I've already thought of several ideas. I just wish I new JS, HTML, and still had developer access (it was easy when I was a student, but since I am only a hobbyist/own-use programmer it isn't practical anymore).

Thanks for the feedback, kman! We were unbelievably shocked to find out we won the contest. We are grateful to Apple for showing their support for students internationally, and the GNUGo team for all of their hard work on the engine. It will take some time to incorporate more features into GoBoard, but we are happy the way things turned out!

As for developement, hit the Javascript and Photoshop tutorials. An entire widget can be programmed in Javascript and run/tested in a browser. Once the Dashboard SDK becomes public, then incorporate some of the final touches.

If you need to use Obj-C, look into the WebKit plugin api and go from there.

Good luck, and have fun!

Originally posted by zachs:
Neat! Too bad they aren't up for download, though.

I'll be making a download page with the artwork, photos, screenshots, and source to GoBoard. I'm not too sure about our NDA, Tiger, the Dashboard SDK, and sourcecode from Apple widgets, but I dont think it will be a problem.

Anyhow, it's great to hear feeback about our little widget! I'll work hard to get it presentable for the public and to work with Carl on a 1.0 relelase soon!

Thanks for all your positive comments,
-Chris

Funny Bugga · Jul 5, 2004, 10:03 PM

Carl and Chris, Good works! Why is your name in brackets on the Apple page Chris?

I was searching for more widgets earlier and came across The Dashboarder. Pity there aren't many widgets there yet, but maybe once you two start making more it will catch on!

kman42 · Jul 6, 2004, 12:09 AM

Originally posted by fuzzy:
Hey Folks!

It's Chris Mullens here from the GoBoard duo.

Soon enough. When I get some time, I am going to make an OBoard or Dashello Funny story about Othello... well, I guess Carl sums it up best:

Heh. In my defense, I had played Othello on and off for a long time. When I migrated over to OS X and started doing Cocoa development, I searched for UNIX/C engines, but came up short.

Frequenting slashdot led me to many articles and posts on the game Go. I had never played a game myself, but had read briefly on how it was played and mostly the difficulties creating an AI for the game. I was more interested in the Chess Vs. Go complexity debates than the game itself. It's Othello that I like to play.

When it came time to program a widget, I brainstormed a LOT, and made a shortlist of things I'd like to do. I knew the GNUGo engine was out there from hunting for Othello way back, so I proposed it to Carl. I still had Othello in my head, however, up until the GUI debacle.

Thanks for the feedback, kman! We were unbelievably shocked to find out we won the contest. We are grateful to Apple for showing their support for students internationally, and the GNUGo team for all of their hard work on the engine. It will take some time to incorporate more features into GoBoard, but we are happy the way things turned out!

As for developement, hit the Javascript and Photoshop tutorials. An entire widget can be programmed in Javascript and run/tested in a browser. Once the Dashboard SDK becomes public, then incorporate some of the final touches.

If you need to use Obj-C, look into the WebKit plugin api and go from there.

Good luck, and have fun!

I'll be making a download page with the artwork, photos, screenshots, and source to GoBoard. I'm not too sure about our NDA, Tiger, the Dashboard SDK, and sourcecode from Apple widgets, but I dont think it will be a problem.

Anyhow, it's great to hear feeback about our little widget! I'll work hard to get it presentable for the public and to work with Carl on a 1.0 relelase soon!

Thanks for all your positive comments,
-Chris

Any recommendations for some good javascript tutorials?

kman

teszeract · Jul 6, 2004, 12:30 AM

The widgets and gadgets are Accessories. You can now Accessorise your computer. Lets see - I've got guests coming around. I think I'll Accessorise with Stock TIckers, Live feed from Victoria's Secret and the Team's iCal.

krove · Jul 6, 2004, 01:06 AM

Does anyone know how the stock graphs are generated? Being that this is all webcore powered, I'm wondering if they are using flash or simply downloading the graphs. I doubt the latter because the graphs have characteristic OS X anti-aliasing. Maybe SVG?

I might die and go to heaven if it were SVG (natively rendered, mind you). I doubt that, too. So what is it?!?

krove · Jul 6, 2004, 01:14 AM

Actually, just read Dave Hyatt's blog and he might have answered my question. Did he?

Link:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/

fuzzy · Jul 6, 2004, 03:11 AM

Originally posted by Funny Bugga:
Carl and Chris, Good works! Why is your name in brackets on the Apple page Chris?

Thanks! The contest wasn't geared for a multi-person submission, I believe. We used Carl's email account when we submitted, so he got the "official winner" slot on the final announcement. Apple was kind enough to include my name on the website so that I could receive recognition, too.

The entire widget was collaborative, from UI suggestions to Obj-C interfaces, so I'm grateful they could sneak my name in.

-fuzzy