I was pleasantly amazed to find out that Apple’s DashCode includes a Project Template for building a “Maps Widget” that handles GeoRSS feeds and KML documents.

Dashcode Map Template

If you’re not familiar with them, Apple Mac OS X provides Dashboard Widgets - which are small HTML and Javascript enabled windows that can quickly display information such as sports scores, travel information, stocks, and thousands of other applications. Apple’s recently released update to their operating system, Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard, includes the final version of DashCode. DashCode is a development environment for building these widgets.

Building a Map Widget is simple: select the project, add a GeoRSS or KML URL, get a GoogleMaps API Key (confusing because Google requests a URL, which isn’t actually used by the widget), Save it and you’re done - near instant Map Widget.

Dashboard Map Widget

2 Responses to “Apple’s DashCode has a GeoRSS Widget template”

  1. kartentisch » Schnelldurchlauf: Noch mehr Links Says:

    […] Damit lassen sich auch ganz einfach Karten-Widgets bauen, die GeoRSS und KML verarbeiten. Nötig ist dafür allerdings eine Google Maps API. Gefunden via Ogle Earth, wo es auch ein kleines Beispiel-Widget zum Download gibt. […]

  2. GeoRSS Weblog » Blog Archive » GeoRSS in a Book Title Says:

    […] Looking over the categories of books that mention GeoRSS, there is a very good selection. The most prevalent, and obvious, are mashup and programming books. There is a Mac OS X Leopard book, assumedly referring to the included Dashboard widget. There are a number of surprising (and incorrect) results, such as “A Unsocial Socialist”, which is actually an incorrect OCR for “George”. Posted by ajturner Filed in Paper/Preso […]

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