Monday, September 19, 2005

Dashboard Sleep Widget

I like to listen to stuff when I go to bed. The stuff is usually played from my laptop. The problem is that I don't want the laptop to play music all night. Nor do I want it to cut off before the audio is done playing in case I happen to be listening to a Spanarna episode. Now there's a Dashboard widget to meet my needs. I'll call it Sleeper Snooze for now. Somebody pointed out that there's already a "Sleeper" widget on apple.com.


You might find it more useful for other things such as putting the computer to sleep after your 37 minute download complets and you're already out the door.

Anyway, some links that came in handy while doing this for the first time:
Dashboard Programming Guide (everything from style guidelines to javascript callbacks)
Debugging Dashboard Widgets (especially if you have to use an Objective-C cocoa plugin)

Problems/Todo:
The (X) to close the widget positions itself offset from the corner.
Implement buttons using the -apple-dashboard-region controls.

Update:
Source also available at http://github.com/emtrane/Sleeper

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would be good if it had other power options aswell, like to turn mac off, or log out, etc.

Martin Davidsson said...

I can try to add it if you would use it then, and if you identify yourself :)

Anonymous said...

brilliant! exactly what i was looing for. thank you.

Anonymous said...

This widget is great! Thank you!!

Anonymous said...

Hi very nice widget! exactly what i was searching for.

Anonymous said...

just got finished writing to the Mac OS team about the need for.... oh... there it is. Snooze!

Man, why the Cupertino cats didn't come up with this long ago and make it an installed widget is beyond me. It's so obvious. Maybe it will be in leapord.

but until then, thanks for the gift. it's beautiful and simple, just how it suppose to be.

michael
Los Angeles

Martin Davidsson said...

Thanks for all the kind feedback!

Yasir Said said...

please oh please can you release this as an application and not a widget, i dont do this process very often and would much prefer it to be an application i can just run when necessary, been trying so hard to replicate but im too inexperienced with the code.

i would greatly appreciate it! (i know its been ages since you released it!)

Anonymous said...

Muchisimas gracias, me ha ayudado muchísimo para programar subidas y no tener que tener el ordenador todo el día encendido

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this fine widget, and greetings from Bavaria, Germany.

sapphire said...

haha martin. i was searching for nikon d200 accessories and this post was on the second page of google. obviously, your sleep widget wasn't what i was looking for. sorry dear. ;)

-preet

Anonymous said...

Thanks very much from northern Japan! I agree with the commenter who said it would be nice to have the option to shut down in addition to sleep, but, hey, it's free and it works.

Anonymous said...

Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!

Oppermafkees said...

Hi i love your widget and have been using it for years! now after i updated to 10.6 it stopped working :(
I was wondering if it ever got updated..
If not i would like to download a fresh copy to see if it just got broken, but the download link isn't working!
Could you repost it please?

Martin Davidsson said...

Yasir: I posted the source on GitHub so you can try porting it to an application.

Oppermafkees: Try it in 10.6 now (download link above)

Oppermafkees said...

Thanks a lot, its working again!! :)

/\__/\ said...

I have been visiting this site http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/10/02/secrets-to-a-good-night-sleep.aspx and i think if they add this to their site, it'll attract more visitors or rather make people come back to the site, just sayin'.

Baron said...

This was hard to find and I'm so glad it's still accessible. Dashboard may be an Apple orphan, but a simple widget for this purpose is far better than an app. Thanks very much for writing this a keeping it available.