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Interface Design
Throw it on the Dash, Part II
Write your own Dashboard Widget
Issue: 4.1 (September/October 2005)
Author: Toby Rush
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 9,139
Starting Page Number: 42
RBD Number: 4120
Resource File(s):
4120.sit Updated: Monday, September 19, 2005 at 12:22 PM
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
In the last issue, we went over Apple's guidelines for widgets: simple utilities that exist on the Dashboard in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. This time, we'll actually go through the process of building a widget.
Designing the Graphics
To start with a simple exercise, let's design a widget that allows the user to roll dice. Keeping in mind that the user can have as many instances of our widget as he or she wants (just as with any widget), we'll design it to roll a single six-sided die.
The place to start is in a graphics program like Adobe Photoshop. Any graphics program will work, so long as it allows you to save graphics in the PNG format which widgets use. It's generally a good idea to design against a transparent background, so you can create the rounded corners that fit nicely with Apple's built-in widgets.
In the graphics program, we'll want to create graphics to represent all the possibilities in our widget:
the background of our widget
the initial appearance of our widget (before any processing is done)
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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