Word Check iPhone App

A version of the Word Checker App is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch (Now called "Word Check". Grab it from the iTunes App Store and never have to carry a dictionary for Scrabble, Boggle, crosswords or any other kind of word game.

24-Dec-08 - I can now give out free promo copies of the application. Just email me your email address and I'll send you a code for a free copy. Just promise to leave an honest review (hopefully nice) in the iTunes store - Keilly

08-Oct-08 - A new version of the The Word Checker App has just been released. It sports the following new features:
- Anagram/Bingo Finder
- Crossword Helper
- New everyday English dictionaries.
- Huge Speed Increase.

A whopping 99c from the iTunes App store, or free upgrades for existing users. Search for "Word Check" in the iTunes Store.

  

Listen Again v3.33

Listen to the large archive of recent BBC Radio programmes directly from Dashboard.

Currently supports: Radio 1, 1xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 5 live, 5 extra, 6 Music, 7, Asian Network, Radio Scotland, Radio Ulster, Radio Wales

Requires RealPlayer 10.1
Update, RealPlayer 11 doesn't play when Dashboard is hidden. Use RealPlayer 10.1

Download BBCListenAgain Widget

Shortcut Keys:
Space - Play/Pause
Up/Down - Volume
Left/Right - Skip
s - Stop
v - Voiceover feedback
p - Focus on station popup

What's new:
3.33
- Fixed to work with another iPlayer change
- Added auto update mechanism
- Pressing the 'v' key will enable additional spoken feedback.

3.31
- Descriptions of programmes fixed (broken due to BBC slightly rearranging their iPlayer content)

3.3
- Works with new BBC iPlayer website
- Accessibility: Voiceover use is detected and certain actions are spoken if turned on.
- Better font resizing
- Busy feedback

This has been developed and tested on Mac 10.5

VoiceOver users: when selecting stations use VoiceOver keys with the arrows to select the station from the menu.

Troubleshooting:
Try and play directly from the BBC website. If it works there then it will almost certainly work in Dashboard. If not the problem has historically been issues with RealPlayer - try uninstalling and reinstalling RealPlayer using the version from the BBC website. Reboot after the reinstall to restart Dashboard.

Let me know any other problems.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you're using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

ListenAgain 3.31

Update: It seems the BBC have changed the format of their iPlayer pages again, causing the widget to not be able to play any of the streams. Look out for version 3.32 shortly

An upgrade to BBC ListenAgain. Programmes had started to disappear from the 3.2 version as the BBC moved its ListenAgain archive to its new iPlayer. This version of the widget restores those programmes.

What's new:
3.31
- Descriptions of programmes fixed (broken due to BBC slightly rearranging their iPlayer content)

3.3
- Works with new BBC iPlayer website
- Accessibility: Voiceover use is detected and certain actions are spoken if turned on.
- Better font resizing
- Busy feedback

This has been developed and tested on Mac 10.5

VoiceOver users: when selecting stations use VoiceOver keys with the arrows to select the station from the menu.

Requires RealPlayer 10.1
Update, RealPlayer 11 doesn't play when Dashboard is hidden. Use RealPlayer 10.1

Download BBCListenAgain Widget

For blind users there's also an experimental version that gives extra speech feedback if voice over is turned on.Download VoiceOver Version

Troubleshooting:
Try and play directly from the BBC website. If it works there then it will almost certainly work in Dashboard. If not the problem has historically been issues with RealPlayer - try uninstalling and reinstalling RealPlayer using the version from the BBC website. Reboot after the reinstall to restart Dashboard.

Let me know any other problems.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you're using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

ListenAgain 3.3

An upgrade to BBC ListenAgain. Programmes had started to disappear from the 3.2 version as the BBC moved its ListenAgain archive to its new iPlayer. This version of the widget restores those programmes.

What's new:

- Works with new BBC iPlayer website
- Accessibility: Voiceover use is detected and certain actions are spoken if turned on.
- Better font resizing
- Busy feedback

This has been developed and tested on Mac 10.5

VoiceOver users: when selecting stations use VoiceOver keys with the arrows to select the station from the menu.

Requires RealPlayer 10.1 Update, RealPlayer 11 doesn't play when Dashboard is hidden. Use RealPlayer 10.1

Download

For blind users there's also an experimental version that gives extra speech feedback if voice over is turned on. Mileage varies from machine to machine Download VoiceOver Version

Troubleshooting:
Try and play directly from the BBC website. If it works there then it will almost certainly work in Dashboard. If not the problem has historically been issues with RealPlayer - try uninstalling and reinstalling RealPlayer using the version from the BBC website. Reboot after the reinstall to restart Dashboard.

Let me know any other problems.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you're using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

Creating a Swing Dashboard Widget - Summary

So the original intention was to create a Dashboard style widget UI using Swing.

In nine fairly simple steps we've gone from a blue square:



...to a nice looking widget that hopefully looks at home on the modern Desktop:



The only shortcut I took was not to pull out the maths book and write my own transform filter.

I'm very pleased with the result, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Hopefully this exercise proves (again) that Swing can be more than just a boring, gray, toolkit suitable for boring, gray, form-filling applications.
The new transparency features especially allow vibrant, modern looking UI's that are relatively simple and quick to create.

So that's really it for the UI.

A few non-UI remarks...

Java widgets have a number of benefits over other widgets systems:
- No framework or widget manager needed
- Platform independent
- Installed from a web-page
- The extensive JDK library available as standard
- Sandboxed and secure automatically
- Familiar language with powerful UI toolkit
- Customizable, fast, accelerated painting (try that in Javascript)

There are still a few non-UI things to do before making this code truly useful: preferences and desktop startup spring immediately to mind.

Performance is also an issue. On my machine the two widgets take about 20 MB of RAM each and 0 CPU cycles when just sitting there. 20MB is considerably more than a simple Widget in Apple's Dashboard for example.
However, in modern machines with RAMs of 1GB+ as standard, and depending who you're asking, maybe this is an increasingly unimportant issue. Especially if the widget is useful.

Feel free to use the Source Code. Don't forget you'll need the filters classes from JHLabs.

Source Code Download

Creating a Swing Dashboard Widget - Part 9 (Examples)

So the widget code is beta complete. With some tidying and refactoring it's time to create some simple examples.

Clock Widget Launch
Weather Widget Launch
(Systems other than OSX* require Java 6 update 10)



With the widget specific code pushed into a base class, these two examples just needed code to gather some information and paint themselves: About 100 lines each.

ClockWidget Code:<br />public class ClockWidget extends PlainWidget {<br /> private static DateFormat dateFormat12 = new SimpleDateFormat("kk:mm");<br /> private static DateFormat dateFormat24 = new SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm");<br /> private static DateFormat df = dateFormat12;<br /><br /> private ClockWidget() {<br /> super();<br /> }<br /><br /> public Dimension getPreferredSize() {<br /> return new Dimension(220, 130);<br /> }<br /><br /> @Override<br /> protected JComponent createFront() {<br /> // --- Edited out boring front creation code ---<br /> panel.add(new ClockPanel());<br /> return panel;<br /> }<br /><br /> @Override<br /> protected JComponent createBack() {<br /> JComponent back = super.createBack();<br /> // --- Edited out boring back creation code ---<br /> return p;<br /> }<br /><br /> protected Point getCloseButtonLocation() {<br /> return new Point(0, 18);<br /> }<br /><br /> private class ClockPanel extends JComponent {<br /> private Font f = new Font("Arial", Font.BOLD, 65);<br /> private Font amf = new Font("Arial", Font.BOLD, 12);<br /> private static DateFormat dateFormat12am = new SimpleDateFormat("a");<br /> private Timer t;<br /><br /> private ClockPanel() {<br /> Timer t = new Timer(1000, new ActionListener() {<br /> public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae) {<br /> widgetComp.repaint();<br /> }<br /> });<br /> t.setRepeats(true);<br /> t.start();<br /> }<br /><br /> public void paint(Graphics g) {<br /> Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g.create();<br /> g2.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING,<br /> RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);<br /> g2.setFont(f);<br /> g2.setColor(Color.WHITE);<br /> g2.drawString(df.format(new Date()), 0, 51);<br /><br /> if (df == dateFormat12) {<br /> g2.setFont(amf);<br /> g2.drawString(dateFormat12am.format(new Date()),<br /> getWidth() - 18, 16);<br /> }<br /> }<br /> }<br /><br /> public static void main(String[] args) {<br /> new ClockWidget();<br /> }<br />}<br />These examples are just a taste of what's possible, rather than meant be really useful as working widgets - e.g. the weather widget is hard coded to San Francisco and could do with some better graphics.
They also illustrate one real advantage over traditional Javascript widgets in the use of the familiar libraries which are shipped as part of the base JDK. The weather reads an Yahoo XML feed and the clock uses a date formatter, both easily done in Java with no external libraries to download, license, ship, or understand.

Source code and summary next.

*I managed to fix the earlier OSX rendering problems by explicitly clearing the graphics before each frame. The widgets will now run on OSX with no additional downloads (Java 1.5).

Creating a Swing Dashboard Widget - Part 8 (Close Animation)

To prove that its possible to produce, fairly easily, and faithful interpretation of a UI it's important to get the little touches right.

When I added the close button I mentioned that the close action has a nice swoosh animation as the widget is removed but conveniently didn't implement it.

So I took a shot, and it actually it wasn't too bad.

There's already the basis for it:
- The code that is used in the flipping animation snaps an image of a component and transforms it.
- The marvelous Filter library from JHLabs provides various image distortion filters, or if you want to use no libraries and are good at matrix maths then roll your own BufferedImageOp )

I factored out the general component animation from the flipping animation code to create a simple framework that can visually filter a component over time - just supply the distortion or adjustment.

Using the Image Processing Editor I tried out different filters with different setting. It looks like Dashboard is using a Pinch filter to distort the widget away to nothingness.

The distortion code is quite small: use a pinch filter and gradually adjust the pinch amount and radius over time (once per timerTick()). The same image is painted every few milliseconds, and using this filter it displays the animation.
Oh, and the widget should fade over time too, so gradually reduce the alpha:
<br />public class CloseTransition extends AnimatedTransition<br />{<br /> private float alpha = 1.2f;<br /> private float alphaStep = 0.02f;<br /> private PinchFilter pinchFilter = new PinchFilter();<br /><br /> public CloseTransition(JComponent startComp, JLayeredPane layerPane)<br /> {<br /> super(startComp, startComp, layerPane);<br /><br /> pinchFilter.setCentreX(0.01f);<br /> pinchFilter.setCentreY(0.1f);<br /> pinchFilter.setRadius(Math.min(startComp.getWidth(),<br /> startComp.getHeight()));<br /> }<br /><br /> protected void updateInterImage()<br /> {<br /> }<br /><br /> protected boolean timerTick()<br /> {<br /> pinchFilter.setRadius(pinchFilter.getRadius() * 1.07f);<br /> pinchFilter.setAmount(pinchFilter.getAmount() * 1.05f);<br /> alphaStep *= 1.07;<br /> alpha = Math.max(0f, alpha - alphaStep);<br /> return alpha <= 0f;<br /> }<br /><br /> protected void paintInterImage(Graphics2D g2, int width, int height)<br /> {<br /> g2.setComposite(AlphaComposite.getInstance(AlphaComposite.SRC_OVER,<br /> Math.min(1f, alpha)));<br /> g2.drawImage(startImage, pinchFilter, 0, 0);<br /> }<br />}<br />
Sccchhhuuuupppppppp.....


Webstart the demo (Java 6 update 10 is needed or it'll look funny). Hold 'Alt' to get the close button to appear.