CreativeApplications.Net

1685 How To Create a Simple RSS Dashboard Widget [Tutorials, Mac]

Today we bring you a quick video tutorial (bottom of this post), or more like a demonstration on how to create your own RSS widget for your Mac Dashboard. This may be of your own blog or a site that you really like and want to stay up to date straight from your dashboard. This is also a great tool to promoting your own blog and allowing your readers to access your site in more ways than one. Of course, more featured widgets can take long time to develop but when it comes to template based ones already done for you by Apple, these can take anything from 5-10 min. This is also a form of an intro to Dashcode, application that allows you to create widgets for your mac. Here is an example of a widget we created for CAN. You can also find it now on Apple’s website. It took about 25min =]

Download it Here.

Before you do anything you need to download Apple’s SDK. You can do this by visiting developer.apple.com , registering (Apple ID, it’s free) and downloading it, followed with an install. This can also be iPhone’s SDK as Dashcode application is included (note: 1.75gb download).

Dashcode is the application that let’s you create widgets. Very simple to use for widgets like RSS because they are already included as a template. All you need to basically do is specify the RSS feed and it’s done. If you want to change the look of it, this is quite simple too but if you want to go beyond this and add some additional features, this may be slightly more complicated and we suggest visiting dashboardwidgets.com forum for regular discussions on the subject.

When you have finished creating your widget, a great idea is to submit it to Apple downloads section for some shameless self-promotion. This process is quite simple although you need to be careful with your widget icon (PNG file with transparency) and making sure that all the release details and file naming is correct. Apple likes to keep things clean so don’t be discouraged if you are repeatedly told that the information you submitted is incorrect. Keep trying!

Also don’t forget to add your new dashboard widget to dashboardwidgets.com. The site receives regular visits and more downloads in some cases than Apple’s downloads section.

And now, the video demo. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask in the comments below.

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• Author: Filip

  Architect, Lecturer, New Media Technologist. Based in London and Berlin. MacBook Pro 15" + iPhone.

  
  URL: http://www.fvda.co.uk
  View all entries by Filip