Scott Boms

Our April 2005 Back Catalogue

Spotlight for Web Developers and Designers

Welcome to the long-delayed (and awaited) Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. 1.0 site. It’s been a long journey from original concept through revision after revision after revision to get to where we are right now. That being said, there’s still work to be done and bugs to fix and pieces otherwise missing or incomplete. These will all be attended to shortly.

For those interested, here’s a quick laundry list of some of the basic features of the site.

  • Designed for 1280 pixel wide monitors. Yes, you heard me. It will display fine at 1024 though. Go big or go home.
  • Search features use XMLHTTPRequest via the Bitflux Livesearch open-source process. This means that support for IE 5:mac and older versions of Explorer on Windows are broken. We are aware of this and are active researching a nice way to have those browsers degrade rather than throwing up JS exceptions.
  • Some headings are styled using sIFR 2.0 to provide custom fonts where we would otherwise have to be producing large numbers of images and thus, reducing bandwidth requirements and providing better accessibility. It degrades silently in browsers which do not have Flash or who have Flash content blocked. More coming on this in future revisions.
  • Check whether we’re online via the iChat widget in the main navigation bar. If the dot is green, we’re online, if not we’re away or offline.
  • The site is built using CSS/XHTML and should be fully-validating. You can check using the links at the bottom of each page if you don’t believe us.
  • A spiffy new Favicon.
  • Category-based Portfolio content — view all projects or break-down by category.

Dashboard Widget Xcode Template Update

My Dashboard Widget Xcode Template is now listed on MacUpdate with 704 downloads and counting. Since there are scattered rumours of Tiger already being delivered to some users (a week early), get your copy while it’s hot!

A Few Dashboard Widget Notes

The Dashboard is a bit of a web developer’s paradise - standards-based code with only one browser required for development and testing. Plus, the use of web plug-ins as well as system level scripting languages (AppleScript, Ruby, Perl, etc.). The possibilities are almost endless really.

Dashboard
Widgets in the Mac OS X Dashboard

Creating widgets for the Dashboard isn’t really that hard, but there are a handful of useful things to know before you get started and I’ll try to outline a few that will hopefully save a bit of debugging and gray hairs along the way.

  • RTFM. Read the developer documentation. No, seriously there’s good, useful information in there.
  • Always, always, always have a default image in the main directory of your widget. Name it Default.png. It gets used as the drag image when a user decides to try your fancy new widget in the Dashboard.
  • Create a version.plist file and keep it up to date if you modify your widget.
  • Be sure to create an Icon for your widget to show in the Widget Bar. Name the file Icon.png and keep it in the main directory of your widget bundle.
  • Test your widget in Safari during development and keep an eye on the Console for debugging messages.
  • Download my Dashboard Widget Xcode Template (Works in Xcode 1.x and above, so yes, it works on Panther). Decompress the archive and place the contents in a new folder called Dashboard under this path:
/Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Project Templates/

The template will do a lot of the preliminary work for you. It creates the base HTML, CSS and JS files along with the necessary property list XML files - and will automatically modify certain properties in and of those files based on the name you give the project.

The Info.plist file contains all the current allowed properties for a widget. Disable or remove as necessary, but they’re all there to save you looking them up in the documentation.

Well… what are you waiting for? Let’s see those widgets!

Moving The Plan Forward

To try to keep things relatively sane around here I decided to keep this somewhat under wraps, but now’s a suitable time to spill the beans publicly. I promised something about this about two weeks ago and it’s time to make good on that.

The Scoop

First, the Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. site is on track to launch as part of the May 1st CSS Reboot. This is big since I’ve been struggling for the better part of two years to find the time and energy to do something about it. Still, it’s not just a random occurrence that this is happening now… which leads me to points two and three.

In recent months I’ve been gathering contacts and sourcing out opportunities to strike out on my own in a much larger way than the bits of freelance work I’ve been doing for a number of years now. What this means is that Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. is a full-time gig now(!), and as such the site needs to be done. For real. And it will be.

Stacks of business cards
Stacks of new Wishingline business cards and stationary

…But what about Masterfile you ask? Well, timing is everything really. As I was contemplating this and discussing the ramifications with Emily given that we were about to move to a new house; things were starting to wind down on a few active projects and it just happened to be a good time. There are some fantastically smart people who work at Masterfile and I feel I did good work and helped contribute to what is now a better site than where it was when I started.

From a front-end code perspective, the site is certainly more standards-compliant and (hopefully) leaner than before considering the big features such as SimSearch, weighted search and floating thumbs which were all added in the last year along with a major re-branding (and one colour change with another on the way). For me it’s been a good opportunity to work in a different kind of team environment and to learn things along the way that I can now use to good advantage, and make my own. All the best to the new media department in the massively big upcoming project. I’m sure it will turn out great.

Our Operators Are Standing By

And now for the big plug… If you know of companies in need of web or print design, Mac-focused technical consulting or training services, please drop me a line.

In general, I will be looking for projects in the local Toronto area though I can, and have worked with international clients (big and small). I will be starting to accept new work at the beginning of June 2005.

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