Archive for 2011

Dashboard Widgets - Reach Challenges and Xbox Live Gamercard

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A few months ago I finally gave in and bought a MacBook Air, and I haven't looked back. At this point I'm using my Mac for most of my day-to-day computing, and I'm very happy with it. It's certainly much friendlier to the predominantly Ruby-based web development I like to do. As a first dip of the toes into Mac programming, I decided to try to make a couple Dashboard Widgets. Dashboard is the Mac widget platform, sorta like Windows Sidebar only it came first and it's a much better platform. Dashboard widgets are relatively full-featured, built on Webkit using HTML and JavaScript, and can be authored with the free DashCode IDE. I found working with Dashboard to be a little frustrating, and it's clear that Apple isn't investing much in that space anymore, but it's still miles ahead of the excruciating experience of developing Windows Sidebar gadgets.

My first widget was an ultra-simple Xbox Live Gamertag widget, which was basically a straight port from the Windows version. Aside from...

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JSONView 0.7 works with Firefox 8+

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Just slightly ahead of the release of Firefox 8, JSONView 0.7 has been approved on the Mozilla Add-ons site. Firefox 8 actually handles JSON documents in the browser for the first time, reducing the need for extensions like JSONView - now, a vanilla...

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JSONView 0.6

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Last week I released JSONView 0.6 to addons.mozilla.org. This is mostly a bugfix release, but I honestly don't want to change much about such a simple addon. With over 60,000 daily users at this point, I feel that updates should be infrequent and unobtrusive...

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XBList is broken due to Xbox.com changes

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Recent changes to Xbox.com have broken XBList. This happens every time they change Xbox.com, but this time the changes are too major for a quick fix. The way XBList works hasn't aged well, and this is going to require some major changes. That combined...

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