Dashcode/Spore Countdown Widget

For obvious reasons, I’ve been reading all the press about Spore. At one point, I decided to do the cheesy, geeky thing and find a Dashboard widget that counts down to Spore’s release. Only I couldn’t find one that I liked. So I did the even geekier thing and wrote my own.

Melissa made noises about Kool-Aid and cults, but if you’ve ever played with DashCode, you’ll realize that my widget is a barely-modified version of the default countdown template. I fiddled with some colors, set some attributes, and added a graphic from the fansite kit. Other than downloading the fansite kit, which took eons on our slow connection, the whole widget probably took 30 minutes of my time.

I’ve played with DashCode before, but always with ambitious projects in mind that demanded more than the Dashboard infrastructure would allow. I was impressed with the application at the time, but ultimately my widget ideas didn’t go anywhere. Having a project go from start to finish in a short time made me appreciate just how easy DashCode is. I didn’t need to do any coding for the widget; any moderately technical person could have set it up.