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Yeah, as a graphic designer I can tell you that objects on the left will draw your eye first. I edited the css in the one I downloaded to put the logo on the left and the refresh on the right (and a bit smaller ...14px instead of 20px) and it seems to flow a bit better.

My only question is do we need the ping info. If we don't have the ping info it will probably stop the horizontal scrollbar from popping up in most instances. If people want to see that info ...keep it in though.

theshortcut wrote:

the only reason i ever looked at the ping was to make sure that the widget was refreshing.. hadn't seen the horizontal scrollbars come up. Apple actually recommends keeping all "aqua" elements off the front of the widget, so i need to implement some code to put a custom scroll in there. that will look nicer anyways. i've got a version working with variable ip now and displaying that server's name up top. thanks zwei for that applescript stuff you upped earlier. i think that is about all i have to work out before the variable ip and connecting works. let me know what you all think about ping... keep it or not?

oh.. about the applescript, zwei, i couldn't get your info.plist to open in anything... where in the script is the name of the preference it is looking for?

edit: just saw your comment in the script.. so the paragraph number = the key number in the .plist file?

Also.. how do you all feel about having the MA server as the default IP the first time someone opens the widget??

Yeah, make MA the default server ..i vote drop ping, if there is a way to have the graphics visually display it's updated (maybe a green dot means it's connected and finished) ..just an idea

I edited the Info.plist simply by opening it in textedit (or bbedit). When you open the real Info.plist file in textedit just count down how many lines to the IP address line. (every line counts as a new paragraph -wrapping) ...If you have a copy of the Info.plist you can upload to me I can figure it out if you don't want to mess with it.

I did find out that the applescript doesn't work in Panther. The get path to me command references core services instead of the script itself. I think it would work if you saved the script as an application, but I remember I had trouble doing that with the last file. Just remember if you save the script as an app you'll have to edit the path line to reflect the change. We'll get it figured out

If you could send me a preliminary version of the widget I could probably implement the applescript and send it back so you could finish it up.

Here is the newest version which has the most updates so far. These updates include:
animated refresh button
connect button rather than just on the logo
variable ip
and probably some other cool stuff that I can't think of right now

check it out and tell me what you think.  I think this could almost be a 1.0

The latest version kicks ass,  but I found 2 bugs:

1)  Changing the server IP on the back side isn't working for me.  I can't seem to click done after changing it.
2)  When the server was down the widget threw a lot of unreadable garbage in the bottom half.  It looks like it was coming from the PHP script.

there have been many notes sent on apples dev list complaining about the sometimes sketchy firing of events in widgets. this is a noted problem and may have been what you experienced altivec. let me know if it keeps happening for you after refreshing the widget. i am working on clearing up all the php garble.

Thanks a lot man. Your hard work has definitely paid off!

Very cool!  It's really come a long way from the initial release good job!  As far as a name, how about ET Phone Home? 

Shagz wrote:

As far as a name, how about ET Phone Home? 

ET Reconnaissance

??

So...when is this bad mama-jama being let loose on the unsuspecting Mac ET loving public?

Edit: I see that it's on apple's page and macupdate, ya may want to put it on Versiontracker, dashboardwidgets.com, and dashboardexchange.com.

yeah, see matt's post (#65).

yeah.. i was using text as my connect button. matt switched to a completely graphical version.