I want to make my own widgets... I'm not sure where to start.

[louisl]

Since I'm playing around with my Mac more each day I thought it would be cool to try and make my own widgets for fun. Now I'm not a "coder" and dont know much about programming but can hack my way around.

However, I do know XHTML, CSS, and your basic lite PHP code. I'm just fasinated with the whole widget "mini app" thing and not sure if it requires allot of work or its something I can tinker with and see how it goes.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[J Walk]

I know that Leopard will include Dashboard development tools- it should make it a whole lot easier to build a widget.

[Yuiichi]

You don't have to wait till Leopard drops though! If you sign up for a free Apple Developer account, you get access to the Dashcode beta. Dashcode allows you to build widgets without writing a line of code. Take a look at the demo Apple has up on their website!

Hope this helps!

[Raven]

Dashcode should be candy to use for someone with CSS and PHP experience. (It's designed to be easy for those of us who don't.) If you need any help, just let me know.

[louisl]

Dashcode looks really good. I didn't think I can try it out until the next OS version. I tried to sign up but it wont let me with my current Apple ID. I'm tired of making up different user names, so I'm going to send them an email and see what I need to do.

It was my old .Mac ID and want to keepo them in sync just in case I decide to get .Mac again. But thanks for the info on the Apple Dev stuff, I did not know it was free.

[Ginamos]

With your knowledge, widgets shouldn't be too difficult, essentially they're a bundle of HTML, CSS, Javascript and image files.

Apple have a good guide on how to build widgets on their site, there are other sites that provide resources, just try Google.

If you install the developer tools on the Tiger install CD, there are a collection of example widgets, starting with obligatory "Hello World" widget.

If you just want to dive in, take the "show package contents" option associated with any widget. Most widgets have a fairly standard structure, once you get the hang of it they're not too difficult to work out.

[Aquatox]

FOR THE LOVE OF PETE SOME ONE MAKE AN SCRUBS LISTING TIMES WIDGET!!!!!!!!!!.

*ahem* My cousin has an app that let's you take a section from an specific website and make it a widget, like in the new Leopard. It's more of a underground app, but google it. I don't know the name, but I know it exists!

[cwdaniels]

I played around with daschode the other day, I can see its going to take a little getting used to, and it's a kind of buggy. But I was able to create a real simple 30boxes widget for my events. It was a lot of fun to do it and I hope to get a little more savvy with it as time goes on.