Web Clips: Make Your Own Widgets

5.14. Web Clips: Make Your Own Widgets You dont have to be satisfied with Apples 20 widgets or the several thousand that other people have written.
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Web Clips: Make Your Own Widgets5.14. Web Clips: Make Your Own WidgetsYou dont have to be satisfied with Apples 20 widgets or the several thousand that otherpeople have written. Leopard introduces Web clips, a new way to make a Dashboardwidget of your own—in about three clicks.Web clips exploit an inescapable characteristic of widgets: An awful lot of them exist todeliver real-time information from the Web. Thats the point of the Ski Report widget,Weather, Stocks, Flight Tracker, ESPN, and so on. Figure 5-31. Widgets could, in theory, harbor viruses, so Mac OS X is extremely cautious in downloading them. Top: When you try to download a widget, the Mac asks if youre sure. Middle: After you download a widget and confirm your intention, you meet this test-drive mode for newly downloaded widgets. Its a way to play with new widgets before you actually commit to adding them to your system. Play with the widget, and then click Keep to install it (or Delete, if you think its evil). Bottom: Not all good things come from Apple. Heres a representative sample ofwidgets written by other people. From top left: Plasma Tube, Guitar Chords, ChuckNorris Facts, World Radio, and MiniStat 2 (details about your Mac at the moment).But what if your interest isnt skiing, stocks, or sports? What if its the New York Timesfront page? Or the bestselling childrens books on Amazon? Or the most-viewed video onYou Tube?Thats the beauty of Web clips, a joint venture of Dashboard and the Safari Web browserin Mac OS X 10.5. They let you turn any section of any Web page into a Dashboardwidget that updates itself every time you open it. Its like having a real-time keyhole peekat all your favorite Web sites at once.5.14.1. Creating a Web Clip WidgetHeres how you go about creating a do-it-yourself widget: 1. Open Safari. Safari is the Macs Web browser. Its in your Applications folder. 2. Navigate to the Web page that contains the information you want to snip. Click the Web clips button identified in Figure 5-32. The screen goes dark, with only a small window of white. As you move your cursor around the page, the small white rectangle conveniently snaps to fit the various rectangular sections of the page. As shown in Figure 5-32, your job is to make a frame around the part of the page that usually shows the information you want. If the Web site ever redesigns its pages, itll wreck your widget—but what the heck. It takes only 5 seconds to make it again. Figure 5-32. Drag the little round handles to make the white box just big enough to surround the part of the page you want to enshrine. Or drag inside the box to move the whole thing. Clip button Adjust handles 3. Adjust the corner or side handles to enclose the piece of page you want. When youre finished, click Add, or press Return or Enter. Now Dashboard opens automatically. But wait—whats this? Theres a new widget here that wasnt here before. At first, you might not even notice, because its precisely centered over the piece of Web page that you enclosed. But if you drag it to one side, youll see that its a standalone, full-blown, real-time widget.At this point, you can dress up your widget, adding a little polish to this raw clippingyouve ripped out of a Web page. Click the button that appears when you move yourmouse to the lower-right corner. The widget flips around to reveal the controls shown inFigure 5-33.Figure 5-33. Top: Click a frame style to give your widget better-looking edges. If thewidget plays sound, it keeps playing sound when you close the Dashboard unless you turn on Play audio in Dashboard only. Bottom: Click Edit to return to the front of the widget, where you can adjust its position on the underlying Web page.Here, you can click one of the frame styles to give your widget a better-looking border.If you click Edit, the widget flips around to face you again, and heres where it getsweird: You can reposition your widgets contents as though theyre a window on the Webpage thats visible behind it. Drag the widget contents in any direction within the frame,or resize the frame using the lower-right resize handle. Click Done.You can make as many Web-clip widgets as you want.But heres a big screaming caution: If you close one of these homemade widgets, its goneforever (or at least until you re-create it). Theyre never represented as icons on theWidget bar, as ordinariy widgets are.Ah, well—easy come, easy go, right?Note: If youre of the programmer persuasion—if youre handy in Javascript and HTML,for example—its much easier to write custom widgets than ever before. (Not just Web-clip widgets; real widgets.)Tha ...