Dave's Cool TV Show Widget Version 0.6 ---------------------------- This widget gives you a synopsis of the next showing of a TV show. It pulls the show information from the Yahoo! TV listings. This is still very much a work in progress! TODO list: - Listings are pulled from the Dish Network channels in the central midwest area. Should make this user configurable. - Station/Channels are sort of Yahoo-specific - (SCIFI, CMDY, KXVO, etc). Maybe a drop down menu showing all of the channels in an area? - Save TV show preferences between preset changes. Right now you have to click the "Done" button after entering each show. Backend and web coding done by Dave Archbold (dwarchbold@gmail.com). Artwork by Amy Archbold (pennyguin@animezenith.com). Installation: ******************** Installation should be fairly automatic on OS X. If you have safe downloads turned off in Safari then simply decompress the ZIP archive and double click on the widget. The Dashboard should open and ask you if you want to install (keep) the widget. If you are using an earlier version of Tiger that doesn't support automatic widget installs or something else screws up, then you can always copy the widget bundle ("Daves Cool TV Show Widget.wdgt") to the ~/Library/Widgets directory and reload the Dock/Dashboard. Usage: ******************** After the widget has been installed, drag it's icon from the widget list tray to the Dashboard. The first time the widget is loaded it won't have any preferences so click the "i" icon in the lower right corner of the TV image to flip the widget over and reveal the preferences page. The preferences page has a drop down menu for presets and TV show information. You can enter information for up to nine different TV shows. Before entering information for a new TV show, select the preset slot from the drop down menu. Then fill out the TV show information form (show name, channel, date/time ). Since the widget uses the Yahoo! TV show database to get its information the show name and channel must be something that matches what Yahoo uses. The show name is always required (i.e, Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc). The channel is optional. If the channel is left blank, then the next occurance of the show on any channel will be pulled. The same goes for the Air Date/Time fields. If you do not specify an air date then the next showing will be returned. To save the TV show information, click the "Done" button. Note, you must click the "Done" button after entering each TV show in order for the show preferences to save properly (i.e, don't enter one show then immediately select a different preset slot and enter a second show). This is a bug that will be fixed in a later version. ******************** Revision History: 0.6 - 1/7/2006 The widget will now remember up to nine different shows (called Presets). This is handy if you want to run multiple instances of the widget to track different shows. Instead of keying in each show whenever the dashboard reloads, you can just select each one from the drop down menu on the preferences page. Also added logic to only fetch show data from the web once every 15 minutes (entering the prefs page will force a reload automatically). 0.5 - 9/4/2005 Added options to specify a specific showtime to pull up (day of week + time of day). A channel is required when searching by showtime. 0.4 - 08/31/2005 Fixed some logic. Apparently Yahoo really does use the sid (show ids?). I thought you could just pass it the show title on the URL and it would find it but that doesn't work anymore. So a new routine was added to find the show from their main index page, pull out the sid from it then open up the show detail page. From there, parsing logic remained the same. This should make things much more robust in the future. 0.3 - 08/24/2005 Updated parsing code. Yahoo changed their web code. Previously they used a lot of . Now they use mostly
tags. 0.2 - 08/17/2005 Updated with new artwork and icons from Amy. 0.1 - 08/12/2005 Initial release (my first widget!)