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FinalGear Konfabulator Widget

monkeymax

monkeymax

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Edit:

19th January 2006

Get the latest version (1.0) right here (Save Link As):



Relevant post here.

___________________________________________________________

Well, last night I was looking through the thread elsewhere where people post their desktops and saw some of the wonderful widgets they use thanks to the program Konfabulator (see AxlxA's post here: Post your destop thread)
Anyway, of course I thought "That's cool, I'd love to try out Konfabulator and see what it does..."
I went here and downloaded the program then started getting some Widgets from the Gallery.

Then I wondered whether there was a widget for the RSS feeds from the FinalGear forums. A quick search showed there wasn't but there are a couple of RSS widgets where you can specify the RSS feed you want to use. They work (and do the job) but aren't quite what I wanted.

So I thought I should try to do something myself, using the small amount of programming knowledge I've got. This was 1am though, so couldn't be bothered to start from scratch, instead using John Hines' BBC RSS widget as a helpful template.

Unfortunately I fell asleep in front of the computer an hour later... :oops:

Anyway, having finished some other jobs I had to do today I've had another go at it and at the moment it looks like this:

demo.jpg


You can download it here:

Old Version removed. Obtain the latest version above...


Any comments would be welcome. It's still got a few things I have to sort out later when I get the chance (including implementing some preferences probably) so for now this is a sort of Beta version. Please let me know how you get on, and as my Mac is running OS9 so can't use this, feedback from Mac users is greatly appreciated...


BTW: Windows users have to hold down Control when you drag the widget to move it. OS X users should hold down the Command key when dragging...
 
Fantastic :D

I use Konfabulator on and off throughout the year, theres no-dought that this will be helpfull!
 
I don't know if I'm gonna make use of it as I like to keep my desktop clean, but huge thumbsup for the work! :thumbsup: :bow:
 
Thanks guys. It's still not really finished or how I'd like it to be but it's definately very useful. I'll probably spend more time adding a few more things over the next few days... (I'm an engineer... we love shiny new features! :p )


Edit: Oh yeah, and a quick question maybe someone can help me with related to this (I did a search but couldn't find the answer...)
I'm after the font used for the text in the FinalGear logo... what is the font and is it possible someone could send it to me? Cheers...
 
Lookin good!

http://img482.imageshack.**/img482/9168/fgkonf8pc.jpg
 
Oh, and you should make a site version using http://www.finalgear.com/feed/rss2/ , but it only need to show the last 5 items. :)

I also think it'd be cool if it showed the author and the first X characters of the post if you hovered over it. Oh, and of course crediting the original author in the about image would be good too. ;)
 
Viper007Bond said:
Oh, and you should make a site version using http://www.finalgear.com/feed/rss2/ , but it only need to show the last 5 items. :)
Click to expand...


Would you like that as a second widget, or a feature in this one. The first is easy, the second not so - but something I'm planning on anyway! :)

Viper007Bond said:
I also think it'd be cool if it showed the author and the first X characters of the post if you hovered over it.
Click to expand...

Yup, tried that earlier with one of the DIY RSS feed widgets. Didn't work too well, so I need to play with that some more at some point...

Viper007Bond said:
Oh, and of course crediting the original author in the about image would be good too. ;)
Click to expand...

Yup, meant to do that but forgot. It's on the list of things to do when I next do anything to the widget...

Thanks.
 
monkeymax said:
Viper007Bond said:
Oh, and you should make a site version using http://www.finalgear.com/feed/rss2/ , but it only need to show the last 5 items. :)
Click to expand...
Would you like that as a second widget, or a feature in this one. The first is easy, the second not so - but something I'm planning on anyway! :)
Click to expand...
Second widget so that I can have both open at once. No need to make it an all in one really.

And the length is screwy:

http://img451.imageshack.**/img451/8830/image15lx.jpg

And a pixel or two between rows might look good, I dunno.
 
Righty, lets see if I've addressed some of these issues! :)

1) About box fixed. :)

2) Lengths fixed:

demo2.jpg


3) Gaps now between news items (see pic above - sorry my backround makes it a little difficult to see, but it's there)
This has made it a bit 'taller' but also a bit neater...

4) New preferences box (woohoo!):

demo4.jpg


which means...

5) You can switch between forums and news RSS feeds (will refresh on startup/after changing preferences/at regular intervals):
(But see note* below...)

demo5.jpg


6) You can specify how many items you want to view:

demo3.jpg


7) and, you can specify what you want as an update interval...



Okay, the niggles:

Having 25 news feeds available doesn't seem to work properly at the moment - but why would you want that many?

On that note* above - when you switch between news feed and forum feed it should change the header between forum and news wordings. Additionally the link should change - that is, clicking on forum (in the old version too) opened your browser to the forum front page. And I've set it up so that clicking on the news (or the logo) takes you to the finalgear front page. Unfortunately at the moment the damned thing isn't changing the graphics or the links, so even if you're viewing the news feeds it will still say forum at the moment. This is something I've been trying for a while to fix and it's really bugging me but I can't work out the problem at the moment. Will come back to it later. Workaround at the moment -use 5 feeds for news and more for forum...

Still no author/first X characters of post on mouse hover over items. Will work on that later...

I've not yet had a chance to implement the additional features of the RSS feed into the widget (plan to do this via preferences window). This will happen...

It seems to be running a little slower than before... :( I'm not the best programmer in the world... But will look into it...

It is possible to have a news feed and a forum feed. Create a copy of the widget (i.e. so that you have two available copies of it) and set one up for news and the other for forums. It does work! :) You can have multiple instances just fine, which is cool. And it remembers the preferences for each properly too...


Will keep trying to iron out problems but am going to Gran's for a couple of days as she's having an op tomorrow so will be offline/away for that time. My old mac laptop can't run this so won't be able to test. In other words, there won't be any updates on this for the next 24 hours at least...
I'm not too worried as it now seems to work quite well...


Anyway, enough text. Comments appreciated as before...

Download here! Note - name is as old version so will overwrite it...

Ciao.
 
I've just noticed it doesn't seem to be updating the RSS feeds at all. Seems I've done something wrong with implementing the update interval part of the settings.

I've set it to the default value of updating every 5 minutes, and so changing that setting in the preferences will have no effect. In the unlikely chance any one has downloaded this widget since I last posted - about 20 minutes ago, please redownload (use the same link)...

Cheers.
 
So now that it's an all in one, is there any way to make it be able to spawn multiple instances? It's really kinda a pain in the ass to have to make a copy of the widget.

If there's no way to spawn multiple instances, than perhaps what I suggested above, two different widgets, would be better. :/
 
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