AIM Fight Widget
Posted at July 22, 2005 06:51 PM - Category: Coding
So, I heard about this neat site called AIM Fight. To summarize, it takes the AOL/AIM screenname of you and friend, and "battles" the two based on your "popularity". Your popularity is determined algorithmically, based on the number of buddies you have, the buddies of your buddies (up to 3 levels deep), and who's online in that big old tree of people. So, not only is it computing the number of people in a large tree of individuals, it's also doing so in real time. Neat!
Someone over at SlashDot had posted the URL that the Flash animation accesses to pull this date. That got me to thinking: What could I use this information in? Why, a Dashboard widget, of course!
Now, I've never coded a widget before this. However, I understood that they were just mini webpages that relied on a little Javascript magic to work. So, I set out on getting one written. I browsed over Apple's documentation and had an AIM Fight widget whipped up in about an hour. Basically, if you're familiar enough with HTML and Javascript, widgets are an absolute snap to code.
So, I present the first AIM Fight widget for download. Simply enter your screen name in the search box and it will show your score. The score updates every 5 seconds while Dashboard is open, so you can monitor your level as people sign on and offline.
Download: AIM Fight Widget 1.0.1
Apple suggests the following information be posted with widget downloads, so here we go:
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
Update:
Man, Apple works late on fridays...
Update 2:
Per Justin's comments below, I've changed the wording "rank" to "score" in the widget display. It still needs support for ranked users (oh, you're not that popular?) with some sort of glowing awesomeness.
