My quest to create widget-based role-playing game utilities for Mac OS X's Dashboard is proceeding slowly, but I am making progress. With any luck I should have the first working widget in about a week for folks to try out.

I've been looking for sources to help me with the whole widget creation thing (seeing as how just reading a JavaScript book and messing around with other peope's widgets hasn't been as enlightening as I thought it would be.

I've found a few useful ones. First up are two articles by Andrew Anderson on O'Reilly's MacDevCenter Web site: "Build a Dashboard Widget" and "Let's Build Another Dashboard Widget". Both offer a step-by-step look at how to create working widgets, advise on debugging said widgets, and references to other helpful sites. I wish he had examples of how to store data in a widget, and how to access a local XML document, which are more immediately useful given my RPG utility plans, but his articles offer a good starting point.

Anderson's article refers to Apple's own documentation for creating widgets: "Developing Dashboard Widgets", which offers an excellent dissection of a widget and an explaination of how they work with Dashboard.

I haven't found any true pen-and-paper RPG widgets yet, but I did come across one for World of Warcraft -- the WoW Server Status Widget -- thanks to the Warcraft World podcast. The widget's pretty basic -- it uses a red/green light to indicate whether your favorite WoW server is up and running -- but it is a kind of RPG widget.

Update: 7/27/2005

In addition to Apple's tutorial, there's an excellent Dashboard Sample Code page which offers a bunch of iterations of widgets, from basic to advanced. Examples include basic flipping widgets, widgets that store data, widgets that process RSS feeds, and just about everything else I need for this project.