Studio Widgets – Musings on Software Development

Like many other software developers, I have my share of unfinished or unreleased projects.

Wiindow Shopper

Wiindow Shopper would have let you browse the latest updates on the Wii Shop Channel, and, if you love a game, it would let you vote for it, Digg-style.  It had a facility for browsing by newest additions or by console, as well as by popularity.  I had even gone so far as to build in a cool little Easter egg.

I was sad to see this one go. The reason that it was never released was because the Wii Shop Channel’s internals were changed to use HTTPS for browsing games.  And, while I found the new URL of the HTTPS site, the server had an invalid certificate which the Wii would just skip right over, but Konfabulator would grind to a halt at when it went to fetch the page.

I shelved the Widget.  One good thing came out of it, though, and that’s my glossy flag set!

Snapper

Snapper was a Widget which would plug into your Mac’s iSight and take a photo every X seconds, and store it to your hard drive.  You could browse the archived shots using the browser in the upper right.

I got it shooting photos, but that was about it.

Funnily enough, you can see its reincarnation in Harry Whitfield’s Widgets which have a license window in them.

Folding@Home Watcher

Back when I was big into processing protein folding, I would run this Widget that I wrote to tell me exactly how far along the unit in progress was.  All work units had a deadline on them, and the Widget would display that in red, and steadily turn the body red if you started falling behind in processing.

I even got so far as making an About Box for the Widget.  Dunno why I never released it.

Temperature Monitor

This is a Widget I run on my Desktop to this day which shows me the various operating temperatures of the components in my Mac Pro.  The one I mainly use is the “Ambient Air” sensor, because it’s actually a good indication of what the temperature is in my apartment.

Bank Watcher

This Widget plugs into my Wells Fargo bank account and fetches and graphs my various account balances.

As you can see, I’m in debt.  The reason I wrote this Widget was to get back on track with my finances.

Not released because of a couple of reasons.  First, Wells Fargo changes their login crap way too often for me to keep up with them (you can see interpolated lines on the graph where they changed the login system and it broke the Widget), and second, if tons of people started using this Widget all at the same time, Wells Fargo would catch on and probably try to shut the Widget down on purpose.

Ratio Watcher

Ratio Watcher was a bit of a dodgy Widget in that it dealt with dodgy BitTorrent trackers.  On private trackers, you have to keep your ratio above a certain amount, and with what was previously quite a limited upload speed, it was hard for me to keep on top of my ratio.  This Widget helped me watch and see when I was going under.

Not released because it was specifically tailored to my needs and it wouldn’t have worked on any old tracker.

Atmosphere

Frequenters of the Konfabulator Forums will recognize this Widget.  It was meant to bring a little more realism to the Desktop back when the official Weather Widget didn’t use realistic weather icons. It also featured the ability to read weather data from several different weather providers, so you were almost guaranteed weather data whatever the circumstances.

I stopped working on it for a couple of reasons, the biggest of which being that I signed a non-compete agreement with Yahoo! when they hired me, and Atmosphere would have competed with the official weather Widget.

Ironically, a couple of weeks before I was laid off from Yahoo!, I was working on refreshing all the weather icon artwork in their weather Widget for some higher resolution initiatives we were working on.  It looks a lot better than the stuff I did for Atmosphere, as well as the stuff that’s in the weather Widget currently.  If it doesn’t end up in the Weather Widget, then I’ll post that artwork here for people to have a look at.

Majora’s Mask Clock

My brother actually designed this Widget, and I coded it.  For whatever reason, we never released it.

Hm.

Heather’s Weather

I wrote this Widget for my girlfriend, Heather.  We were planning on going up to Banff, Alberta, but it was during the winter, and the weather was unpredictable, so we wanted to keep an eye on the extended forecast to figure out the best day to go.

Judging by the screenshot I took today, the weather there is unpredictable even outside of winter.

 

 

Some of these never even made it out of the Photoshop document phase.

World Clock D

World Clock D was going to be a Widget which would have the same functionality as World Clock Pro, but in a digital form factor.  I soon figured that it would be too much work to do on its own.  Maybe someday it will surface in World Clock Pro 3 (God knows when I’ll release that, though).

Triptactics Airport Code Finder

This was a Widget that I started on contract for a client.  For some reason, it never got off the ground.

Stack ‘Em! 2

I wanted to write an update to Stack ‘Em! with new themes and updated features, like holding onto pieces for later and such.  Never completed it.

Kuler

This Widget was going to be extremely simple.  It would plug into Adobe’s “Kuler” application and return highly rated swatches ambiently.

Delegate Watcher

This mockup never got off the ground either.  The resulting Widget would have displayed the current delegate count of the two Democratic candidates.  (Go Obama!)

That’s about it for this post…  Until next time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.