Bloglines Notifier Widget 1.0

Though I do not yet have Tiger, I could not resist the opportunity to make a Dashboard widget. Brilliant programmer/friend Joe Hughes and I tossed around a couple of ideas for our first collaboration of the sort to conclude a Bloglines notifier widget would be useful. Joe of course handled the javascript wizardry and I the interface design. So, without further adieu I present our first attempt at designing a dashboard widget: the Bloglines Notifier Widget 1.0. I will preface the technical description of this widget with the fact that it is not at all technical. All one must do to benefit from this wonderful and free tool is the following:

  • Register with the wonderful and free bloglines.com site
  • Install the Bloglines Notifier Widget 1.0 by simply downloading it with your new and improved Safari 2.0 Internet browser.
  • When the Bloglines Notifier Widget has been installed and run for the first time you will be prompted to enter the E-mail address with which you registered for your Bloglines account into the “email” field on the back of the widget.
  • When your email address has been entered and the “ok” button pressed, the Bloglines Notifier Widget will flip to the frontside and the textfield will be populated with the number of unread news items in your Bloglines account when connected to the internet.
  • Simply press the “go” button to open a browser window and read your Bloglines news items.

Here are the official Apple instructions should the above not suffice: “Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you


Let us hear it

  1. Sweet stuff, this might be handy.



    One thing, the bloglines link might like http:// in front of it.

    Rob Mientjes

  2. I blogged about thi, but since I didn’t see support for a trackback, I thought I’d post my comments here as well.



    First, great job! This is making me even more interested in Tiger. The ability to quickly develop little widgets is going to change how people interact with systems.



    One thing that I think would be cool is to use an IFRAME or something in the design to allow you to actually read your Bloglines feed in a widget, rather than directly at Bloglines. Then, let someone click to open it, either the original, or the Bloglines summary.



    Either way, this is spiffy.

    petrilli

  3. Thanks for the kind words, Petrilli. As Jeremy said, we considered that functionality, but the current bloglines API is unfortunately not very well suited to the task—there’s a pretty good explanation of the problems here.

    Joe Hughes

  4. Jeremy – nice Widget. Would you be willing to upload it to my website (www.handywidgets.com)? Your sharing would be much-appreciated as I work at populating my library of Widgets. Thanks.

    Steve Lundstrom

  5. I put my email address in and it did not show the number of unread articles. Is the server down? Bloglines is running nicely and my address is correct, I can’t figure out what is wrong. I am running 10.4.6 Please help.

    jazzman34653