How To Make Your Own Widget

ByMike Moffit

Apple released their widget making application in beta format just yesterday so I grabbed a copy today and started playing around with it. Let me just say this first, it’s unusually easy to create a widget!

When you open the application you can choose from about 6 templates to get you going or you can start off with a mostly blank slate.

The first widget I made was an RSS reader which displayed this blogs articles. Very simple, took literally 5 minutes to make. Of course I didn’t make any images, I just told it what RSS feed to look at and get its data from. Quite simple!

The next widget was something I created because I thought it would be useful to me. It was a widget that let you search through the data on one of my favorite websites.

Dashcode has all the little buttons, search fields, text, shapes you could ever want for your widget. You can make your own images, which is what I did or you can use some of the ones they provide.

Something I really like about Dashcode was that it has a Workflow area so you can see all the steps you need to go through to complete you widget. When you complete a step you can mark is as ‘done’!

Using Dashcode is very easy to use. It comes with a decent How-To (which can be reached by clicking Help on your menu bar) so you can learn about Dashcode and how things work.

You can download the widget I created by clicking here! You’re also more then welcome to rip it apart and see how I coded it. You should be able to open it with Dashcode and have a peek!

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