Accu 2.0

Download Accu 2.0 now

I got Mac OS X Tiger on Friday and have since become fascinated with developing new Dashboard widgets. I'm hoping jwgh doesn't mind that I've created an updated version of his Accu widget for those of us who like keeping track of AccuWeather's wacky forecast graphics. Although these usually incorporate maps, they are not regular weather maps, but rather they are graphic illustrations of weather patterns, frequently with wacky iconography -- such as giant scissors cutting humidity or storms arriving in huge low-pressure barrels -- or amusing would-be catchphrases like "backdoor front".

The big drawback to the original Accu widget was that it took up a lot of screen space (and was a little rough-looking), so my redesigned version is small by default with little icon-sized versions of the maps, and then when you click on it, it expands to show you bigger versions. This enables it to take up a fairly small amount of space on your dashboard most of the time, but when you see that there are new maps (the tiny shrunken versions are small, but big enough that you can usually tell if you've seen them before or not), you can click to expand and savor the loveliness of the maps. You can also double-click each individual map to go to the related Web page that explains what it means.

Bugs

• Javascript doesn't easily distinguish between double- and single-clicks, so when you double-click a map to go to its Web page, you can see the widget start to rapidly change size and then change back again. The dashboard disappears while this is happening because it gives focus to your Web browser, so you can only see this effect for a split-second, but it's slightly annoying and I'm looking for a way around it.
• For some reason, an optical illusion seems to make the two maps in the bottom row (in the expanded view) seem vertically shorter than the maps in the other two rows. They're not -- I've measured them and they're all the appropriate 160 pixels -- but for some reason this illusion persists for me. Maybe the rest of you won't suffer from that illusion though.

Todo

Maybe have the widget load each map's associated Web page in the background and use regexps to get its headline and info about whether there are more maps on the page (sometimes there is an extra one, and on rare occasions two more) and include those in pop-up tooltips or some such.

Credits

Respect is due to:

• jwgh for the original version
• Eddie Traversa for the method of making images stretch and shrink with their containers, enabling me to have more entertaining animation of the change between collapsed and expanded view (necessary for those of you who insist on holding down the shift key during OS X animations)
• Randy "ydnar" Reddig for the slick CSS drop-shadow technique
• Apple Developer Connection for the Stretcher example widget