24 October 2006 — Posted by Allan Odgaard
Widget Creator
Andy Herbert recently announced a Widget Creator bundle (direct link to the bundle). This allows you to create a Dashboard Widget from your current document, be it a Ruby, Python, Perl, shell, or whatever script.
The created widget will then run the script when clicked and you can optionally drag files or URLs to this widget (e.g. from Finder or your web browser), and the script will receive the dropped items as arguments.
There is a screencast showing the Widget Creator bundle in action.
So if you don’t like to write contextual menu plug-ins or compile AppleScripts into applications, in order to get custom (drop) actions in Finder, this bundle provides you with an easy alternative!
24 Oct 2006 | # Tom wrote…
Wow! Finally a use for widgets! This is incredible.
With the announcements of rb-appscript and RubyOSA now this, UI scripting and automation on the Mac has made great strides in the past few weeks. Thanks!
24 Oct 2006 | # Chris Ryland wrote…
Wow, that’s great!
Now if Textmate would just handle Emacs-style numeric args (the whole Control-U prefix), I could switch from Emacs…
25 Oct 2006 | # postlogic wrote…
Wow, that’s just plain useful. I’m going to play with this.
26 Oct 2006 | # Helge Hartmann wrote…
Unfortunately, the screencast does not appear in the screencast list, that I included in iTunes. It would be nice, if you would add it.
26 Oct 2006 | # retnuh wrote…
Is there sound on this screencast? I get no sound when I play it in quicktime or VLC.
26 Oct 2006 | # Allan Odgaard wrote…
Helge Hartmann: I generally do not add third party screencasts to the feed, and Andy is already close to having used up his bandwidth for this month.
But he talked about doing a new screencast (showing latest version of the bundle) with audio, and likely that will be hosted in the feed.
retnuh: It is without sound.
27 Oct 2006 | # Dan Kelley wrote…
I second Tom’s comment. It’s possible I’ll start using widgets now. To date, they have seemed like a broken screw thrown in a bag of nails — a mistake, and not a very useful one.
31 Oct 2006 | # greg wrote…
Can someone who has this bundle make it available at an alternative download location? I’d really like to get started using it.
03 Nov 2006 | # greg wrote…
I finally got it installed and have quickly created a script that lets you drop images onto the widget and have them scaled down to 800 x 600 (or vice-versa) with the scaled version saved to the users tmp directory. Great for preparing photos for upload to an image gallery. The scaling is done using ImageMagick. I may combine this bundle with the new textmate dialog system and add on the ability to upload these photos to an online photo album.
03 Nov 2006 | # greg wrote…
Oops! Forgot to post the script:
for arg in "$@" do #Treat each file dropped on to the widget as "$arg" in this loop cp "$arg" ~/tmp cd ~/tmp /usr/local/bin/mogrify -resize 800x800 "${arg##*/}" done
14 Nov 2006 | # Thomas Fuerstner wrote…
It’s impossible to download the bundle from the given internet address ! Maybe this problem can be solved !?
15 Nov 2006 | # AndyH wrote…
Thomas: The .mac web space where the widget creator bundle is hosted has a monthly download limit of 10GB, which in the past month or so I have managed to exceed. The dowload restriction re-evaluated bi-weekly, so you should be able to download from the webspace at the start or the middle of the month. Allan has also mentioned the possibility of hosting the bundle as part of the central repisitory which I think is a great idea, as well as making the screencast available on the RSS feed, unfortunately the audio quality on the screencast is not great.
14 Sep 2007 | # Lars wrote…
Hi.
I read the advice with the download restriction. I tried to download the bundle today. Is the rate already exceeded? Is there a way to get a copy from somewhere else (even by mail)?
Lars.