Re: easiest way to show alertbox and play sound from a wiget?

As Micah, suggested, a widget shouldn't consume any CPU when it isn't shown, so perhaps a widget isn't the proper environment for the application the original poster is trying to create. Dashboard is intended for on-demand applications, not daemons. However, you can use Dashboard as a view of the daemon. There are several widgets that are good examples of this, such as those that read system load. In that case, the widget isn't doing the processing, but is merely displaying the output from the application doing the processing. I'd suggest that if the application can't gather the data the user needs before they hide the dashboard, it wasn't that important to them anyway. In that case, the complexity of the processing probably would be better served by a compiled application, like Java, or even better Obj-C, rather than _javascript_.

Good luck,

Niels

On May 31, 2005, at 3:09 PM, Guy Brooker wrote:

As Micah says, you can play a sound using an embedded object, but you need to enable AllowInternetPlugins in your Info.plist to make it work from _javascript_.

To show a dialog, use a bit of AppleScript via a widget.system call, e.g:

osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to display dialog "hello"'

You could also play the sound from the applescript too...

Cheers
Guy

Micah Acinapura <email@hidden> wrote:

I will refer you to this line: "A widget can know when Dashboard is active. When Dashboard is hidden, your widget should not consume any CPU time or network resources."

of this site: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/Dashboard_Tutorial/index.html <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/Dashboard_Tutorial/index.html>

when this is the case you might not to make your program a widget.

That being said, here is my code for how to make a widget play sound ( i don't know/haven't tried the alert box issue).

//_javascript_ code
function playNext(){
var thissound=document.getElementById("next");
thissound.Play();
}

//html code
<embed src="" autostart=false hidden=true id="next" enablejavascript="true" />

-micah

On May 31, 2005, at 8:32 AM, Walfrieda Schröter wrote:
Hi,
I am developing a widget that runs in the background, but NEEDS to show a
customized alertbox/infobox upon a certain event and play a sound (kind of
"Hi, something has just happend!"). It should not bring up Dashboard, but
only the alertbox on the normal desktop, with an "OK" button to dismiss
the box.
What would be the most simple and straightforward way to code that?
Apparently is does not work directly via _javascript_ (all alerts are
written to the console then, I use this routinely for debugging), so maybe
this could be achieved by a simple script or something that can be called
from within the widget? How is it done?

thanks a lot in advance for all kinds of advice,
walli

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