Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. - Groucho Marx
After introducing the idea of a Presidential Election Widget last week, I’m pleased to present the implementation! As I indicated last week – my plan was to take the TruveoCast widget I previously wrote about – and turn it from a widget designed to browse the video favorites of Truveo users – to a presidential election news cast – right on your Mac OS X Dashboard! You can see the widget in Figure 1.
Figure 1 - Presidential Election 2008 OS X Dashboard Widget
When the use clicks on one of the search buttons a Truveo query is launched. The query retrieves Truveo indexed videos based on the following query:
tag:'Presidential Election 2008' days_old:<7
The tag: modifier can be used to find videos that have been assigned specific tags. Tags are words or groups of words that typically describe some aspect of the video with which they are associated. Tags can be assigned by individual users, by human editors or automated algorithms.
The days_old: filter can be used to find videos indexed within a specified time period.
For the Presidential Election widget – all videos from the past 7 days tagged as Presidential Election 2008 are retrieved.
The user can use the channel up/down buttons to view the collection of videos retrieved. When the user clicks on the thumbnail preview of a video in the television screen – the video is launched in their web browser for viewing. You can read about the complete implementation of the Truveo query and video viewing in the article: TruveoCast: Building a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget to Share Your Truveo Video Favorites.
Other than a few cosmetic changes to the TruveoCast widget – including the TV screen and the removal of the user search box – this was a straightforward implementation.
Figure 2 shows the widget in action! The complete widget will be available from the Apple Widget download site in the next couple of days. I’ll post a comment once its available!
Figure 2 - Presidential Election 2008 OS X Dashboard Widget Video
Here are some references for Truveo and the base TruveoCast widget:
Presidential Election Widget on Apple Download Site
The Presidential Election 2008 OS X Dashboard Widget Video is available on the Apple Download Widgets site