Yoink

This is one of those widgets that makes me not regret sifting through the growing pile of new (and mostly useless) widgets on a semi-daily basis. Yoink (an appropriate name you either get or don’t) is really clever. Basically it just takes a snapshot of a website and presents it as a thumbnail on your dashboard. You can set it to grab a new thumbnail every set amount of time or only when text changes. You then have access to the three most recent thumbnails. Clicking the thumbnail launches the website.

What’s really neat about this is that it fills a nice gap between reading via RSS and manually checking a site. The first page I loaded in was the Drudge Report because it doesn’t have an RSS feed and changes content very regularly. It’s also one of those sites that you only need to glance at to tell if it’s been updated. If Drudge and his sirens don’t do it for you, most news sites operate under similar principals and reflect a prominent visual change when there is a significant update. Though CNN’s headline wasn’t readable at the smallest size.

Another site I’ll use this for is ESPN since they change the front page and add new articles about twice a day with a corresponding lead image.

My only complaint (one that I have about most widgets) is that even it’s smallest size still takes up too much Dashboard real estate. I’d prefer something one size smaller or an option to temporarily collapse the thumbnail into an icon that I could click to check when I wanted to.

That and a few 1.0 glitches aside Yoink is worth checking out.

The Mysterious Safari Dashboard Button

Appleinsider reports that developers have found an unused button in Safari in the pre-release builds of 10.4.3. This button is not actually active, however, in the version of Safari included with 10.4.3, it’s simply buried in the resources folder inside the application.

Something is strange about this button and I question whether AppleInsider’s assumption that the button detects a downloadable widget on the page is correct. It just doesn’t seem like enough to justify a whole button.

Of all the pages you browse on a daily basis how many include links to Dashboard widgets? Would those few instances really justify it’s own button? I suppose if the button activated when you went to a web app like Odeo or Backpack that had free widgets that complimented the service it could be useful to alert users. But once you had downloaded it, what’s the point of the button still being there, just deactivated?

Also, I mean, it’s not that hard to download widgets. That said, I wouldn’t be too surprised if Apple simply wanted to prominently feature Dashboard and be in-your-face about it in light of new competition from Yahoo’s Konfabulator.

The second problem is one of aesthetics. It just doesn’t fit. It’s black with a bit of red, it doesn’t match any of the other monochrome Safari buttons. In fact, when included in a current version of Safari as seen in this mockup, it’s an outright eye sore.

Granted, Apple is capable of any one of these offenses of aesthetics and logic. My guess is that there’s something more. A missing piece that will make this button make sense. Or maybe not. We’ll find out.

NOTE: The mockups in this post were done by me for demonstration and are not actually screenshots of any Safari builds.

Links Are Now Delicious

I just wanted to give a heads up that I’m using del.icio.us to power my Link Roll. The built-in Textpattern links were OK but I wanted an easy way to seamlessly combine the main feed with the links feed and del.icio.us along with FeedBurner seemed to be the solution.

The biggest difference will be that links will now appear in the main entry feed. I’m not an over-linker so that shouldn’t bother anyone. The only unfortunate thing is that all of my links just got added wholesale into the main feed. Whoops. I also don’t like that they have [del.icio.us] appended to them. If it ends up being annoying, I’ll get rid of it (I was only trying to help, I swear!). Feedback is, of course, welcome.

To integrate del.icio.us with the site I’m using Marshall Potter’s plugin TXP.icio.us (which I defy you to pronounce). It got me up and running in under 5 minutes, so that was pretty neat.

Lastly, here’s my del.icio.us page for whatever noble or nefarious purposes you see fit.