pennypacker.net: Hula Girl Dashboard Widget

Hula Girl Dashboard Widget

I would never have guessed that Dashboard would be so cool and so useful. Nor would I have ever guessed that Hula Girl would be so popular.

Apple recently released Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" and among its new features is Dashboard. It's like Konfabulator, and if you still don't know what it is, it's like a bunch of tiny one trick pony applications that pop-up at the press of f12. There are many applications for it called "widgets" and they all nicely perform little tasks like get weather info or provide a calculator, or in this case, offer up a little bit of eye candy.

Over on clubhouse54.com some months ago there was talk about making widgets for the upcoming Tiger release and petikas, a clubhouse54 user, said that every good dashboard needs a hula girl on it. And so, Hula Girl was born. Another user, Halbie, has a developer's membership and gave instructions on making a widget. It's basically a tiny little web site. Well, I can do that.

So I whipped up a little Hula Girl that bobs back and forth when the cursor is placed over it. Halbie made it into a widget, posted a screenshot (none of us non-developer-membership-types had the software to actually use it). Then it sat for months, rather idle.

As Tiger's release got closer, John Williams asked about Hula and I told him it was dusty. He breathed some new life into it with some nicer art, and made it into a widget anew. (The original widget was stolen by creepy spies in Delaware.) He had an early seed of Tiger as well and he was able to add a few widget features like the ability to flip it over to see the prefs. Then he uploaded it to a widget site.

It was downloaded a few hundred times in the first day. Not bad for a widget that doesn't have any pragmatic purpose! Having witnessed its popularity, we decided we needed a little more than just Hula Girl at the beach. We created a few new backgrounds and a few new hula dancers and provided the means to choose your favorite.

Later, he uploaded it to Apple's site, and after Tiger was released, Hula Girl quickly rose to the number 2 most downloaded widget! John reports that his site has received 4 million requests in the past few weeks. Granted, that's overall requests and not unique visitors, but that's still an awful lot of traffic.

Version 2.1 of the widget is on its way, and it fixes a few bugs. Mainly, it fixes a bug that causes the hula to go very fast, and it saves the users' preferences so that it doesn't always open to the default hula girl on the beach. It also will allow the user to set the speed of the dancer. I'm still looking into a little more robust features that require a little more programming. It'll take a little more learning, but that's what I enjoy most.

under:

Web Development

Widgets

Posted on

2005-05-10