stephan.com
scattered thoughts

Wow, I think I came up with something really good. I wanted to do a Gmail notifier, because there isn’t one. I got something half-assed working, lots of holes, but the big one was I didn’t know how to get a hold of the user, or if I should be letting the process run when the Dashboard was hidden.

Then I realized that’s not the point of Dashboard, it’s supposed to be more like ambient information. And I came up with something really hot.

It’s called “flores.” It looks like the vase to the right (from a picture I found on flickr). You give it your gmail account name and password, and the number of flowers in the vase (up to 4) shows how many new emails you have.

Even cooler, though! You can fill in a name or other string to look for in the author field, so it just shows flowers for the person you are expecting email from. It defaults to my name.

It’s almost done now, I’ve been up all night, really working on this since noonish, so I guess it’s been 15-17 hours, including a trip to the library for Javascript/CSS books. Never really did either of those before.

God, it looks so hot, like a nice little vase on your dashboard. Sweet, not all glassy and crap like the other widgets everyone has done, but a nice natural look that fits in. hee hee hee!!

And it is dedicated to all those I’ve loved.