Pete Freitag Pete Freitag

iTunes Dashboard Widget

Updated on November 16, 2023
By Pete Freitag
apple

itms widgetMy iTunes Music Store dashboard widget has made it on Apple's Top 50 dashboard widget downloads at number 14.

I actually never got around to posting about it here on my blog, but I built it a while back - around the same time I built the dealazon amazon search dashboard widget. It uses the iTunes music store RSS feeds to display the top songs, top albums, featured songs, and new releases on the iTunes Music Store. It also supports all the different locales, and genres.

The dashboard widgets are pretty easy to build if you know javascript, most of them are just HTML, CSS and JavaScript.



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iTunes Dashboard Widget was first published on June 09, 2005.

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Comments

I like the functionality, but the colors are problematic. White on light blue: my iMac LCD monitor makes it all a bluish white. Same goes for the gray copyright text at the back, it is not readable.

It would be nice if the Genre dropdown actually was a list of checkboxes, so I could create my own profile.

Would there be a faster way to display the track data on rollover than to use the INFO labels?

The "hide results" button should in fact be a toggle. Now I need to click the refresh button to show the images again.
by Arthur Clemens on 06/09/2005 at 5:45:22 PM UTC
Thanks for the feedback Arthur, I will do my best to incorporate some of your ideas into the next version.

It would be kind of difficult to make the genres checkboxes, but I'll look into it when I get a chance.

To just change the colors, you could pretty easily just hack open the widget and change the stylesheet.

Anyways I really appreciate your honest feedback...
by Pete Freitag on 06/09/2005 at 5:56:24 PM UTC
Hi Patrick,

Those are great suggestions. Look for them in the next release.

When I was working on the widget I had planned to have the album info show up in a hovering div, but that didn't seam to work inside the widget (worked from safari however).
by Pete Freitag on 07/31/2005 at 4:36:56 PM UTC