Using Twitter and Dashcode to build a Dashboard Widget
Mac users should be aware of dashboard widgets, which are small and contained applications that are displayed on a single screen to allow you to see a lot of useful data at once. For example, Apple computers ship with built in weather, calendar, and calculator widgets — and there are other widgets for sports scores or USPS shipping data. Users can download additional widgets to customize their experience, including many in their online directory. It’s a convenient way to aggregate information in a form that’s both visual, and a keystroke away. And while widgets aren’t anything new, I wanted to share how easy it is to create them.
The video below uses developer software from Apple called Dashcode, and a Twitter account. This project was an outgrowth of my Rochester History twitter account – which is place that I occasionally write facts about Rochester History and users ‘follow’ the account. But thinking bigger, I wanted to create a Dashboard widget for people who aren’t on Twitter. It took only minutes.
Building Dashboard Widgets with Dashcode from Dave Lester on Vimeo.
My example used Twitter, but you could use a very similar process to handle many different kinds of data. It’s all based upon having an RSS feed available. So, if your library catalog outputs an RSS feed then you could easily create a widget of newly added books. Or if it doesn’t, you could use Twitter in a similar way to provide a data back-end. What’s also neat, and I didn’t show in the video, is that you can easily embed media content from a feed as well. A great application of this would be combine a widget with Omeka, which out of the box supplies an RSS feed that’s readable in all themes. A site-specific dashboard widget could pull from the Omeka items browse page and visually display the most-recently added objects to the digital archive. What’s new in the archive? Let’s take a look at our dashboard. Or a professor could build a widget of class assignments using a feed from ScholarPress Courseware. The possibilities are endless.
Do you use widgets for anything useful?
