OSX Widget - gapingvoid

I recently listened to an episode of the Gillmor Gang which had Hugh MacLeod (of gapingvoid.com fame) as a guest.

Hugh is a brilliant cartoonist and marketing guru and was asking if anyone wanted to build a widget for blogs that could display the latest cartoon whenever someone visited.

Well, I’d recently been feeling the urge to try my hand at building a dashboard widget for OSX, so I thought I’d ignore the requested target platform (others have been solving that problem) and try something a little different by building a dashboard widget for gapingvoid.

Here it is:

You can download the widget at http://www.steve-lacey.com/downloads/gapingvoid.wdgt.zip.

The widget pulls the rss feed from gapingvoid whenever it is shown at a maximum update rate of once per hour - there’s a button to force a refresh.

Let me know what you think.

Update: For those of you that haven’t installed a dashboard widget before, here are Apple’s standard instructions:

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

Basically if you’re using safari, you’re set. Otherwise just follow Apple’s instructions or you can just unzip the archive and double-click the resulting widget in a Finder window.

Update 5/10/06 Version 1.1 - Minor bug fix to the widget that addresses a couple of bugs regarding how it figures out what is the latest cartoon.