XM Radio Dashboard Widget - Roll your own with Leopard
When I bought a GPS system for my car, the salesmen talked me into an XM Radio subscription since he claimed I would get traffic updates over XM. It turns out that his claim was true and I can honestly say that the system works. The system very often tells me when there is a problem ahead and offers to reroute. More often, though, the alternate routes are no good so all I get is advanced notice of my misery.
In any case, the added benefit of the XM subscription is, well, having XM Radio in the car. The quality is good and the commercial-free music is a nice thing to have.
Since I’m already paying for the subscription, I recently tried to get more for my money and started listening at work. The XM website has a web page which serves as a simple and clean tuner. It’s jacked up with lots of Ajax goodness, too. I find that Channel 70, “Real Jazz,” is the most non-distracting kind of music to listen to while I work.
For my day hours, I’m on Vista and I found a nice Konfabulator, er, Yahoo! Widget which lets me eliminate the annoying browser component.
At home, though, I’m on a Mac and the only widget in town (as far as I can tell)doesn’t seem to work with Leopard.
Then I remembered that Safari has a cool new feature called “Open in Dashboard.” It turns out that this works great!
All you need to do is bring up the player in Safari and select “Open in Dashboard…” and a nice UI comes up allowing you to select the area of the page to use as the new Dashboard widget.
Once I did this I had a fully functional dashboard widget. Freaking cool!
(
Also, Apple added some nice UI dressing to the clipped portion of the page, making it look like a real widget and not some sloppy web clipping I expected to see. Here are the choices:
Enjoy and rock on.
UPDATE: Remember one more step. On the widget, click the “i” to flip to the widget options. Make sure you clear the checkbox that will cut audio when you leave dashboard mode.
Second UPDATE: Unfortunately, the widget’s browser session will time out and this effectively disables the widget. So nothing I said here is of much use. I was thinking about this all day and fond it to be true when I got home and experimented. At this point, you might as well just open your browser and minimize it to the doc.