Now that Tiger is officially out, documentation on how to develop Dashboard widgets is much easier to come by, so I’m working on my custom weather widget. I finally figured out how to work with the canvas control, so the graph and the compass should be doable now.

I don’t like JavaScript. Perhaps that’s just because most of the stuff one gets when googling for JavaScript are tutorials for people who don’t know anything about web development to copy and paste into their GeoCities page. After finding Sun’s official documentation, it’s been going a little smoother. I still don’t like the language… it’s way too loosely-typed, doesn’t really differentiate between objects and primitives, and is similar enough to Java while being sufficiently different to get confusing.

The screenshot at the left is the exact opposite of the one I posted last week. It has no fancy interface, but the data it displays are live (or they were when I took the screenshot…) Now I just need to merge the two together, and figure out some reasonable way to parse through the whole file to make the graph (that means I need to tackle arrays…)

I just need to get over my aversion to JavaScript, which I’m sure has come from years of seeing it used primarily for really annoying things.

Oh, and an administrative note: I’ve changed the default display from three articles to six, since I’ve been posting more frequently lately and stuff that I’d still consider recent is getting pushed off of the end.

The graphing calculator app included in Tiger is incredibly awesome. I expected it to be more or less a repeat of the graphing calculator that was included with System 7.5; just a function grapher. Nope. It does functions, implicit curves, parametric curves, in both two dimensions and three; it finds intersections, integrates, differentiates, and all kinds of neat stuff. The parametrics in ℝ³ is going to be very useful for me to help visualize some of the functions in my calculus class.

Also, Apple finally added RPN support to their Calculator.app, plus calculations in hex and binary, plus all kinds of cool operations useful in CS. I might actually find it to be a useful application now.

Someone just needs to hack the Dashboard calculator to support RPN now…

At 6:00 pm tonight, I headed down to the Apple Store for the Tiger release party. The line was longer than I’d expected; the wait was about an hour before I actually got into the store. I met a bunch of other Mac fans (including two of the guys from Delicious Monster Software, who were in line in front of me) and a lot of confused people wondering what the big line was for. They handed out these scratch cards at the door. I got a free iTunes song. While I was waiting in line, someone won a 30″ cinema display. Lucky guy.

I played around with Tiger and watched their demos for a while. Neat stuff. I’ve been busy enough with other things that I’ve been really bad at following the Mac news and rumor sites in very much detail for the past six months or so, so other than the stuff that’s been widely publicized, a lot of the stuff is new to me.

Unfortunately, the Apple Store won’t sell any software at education price, so my next stop was the University Bookstore. I wasn’t even sure if they’d have it yet, but figured it was worth a try. Not only did they have it, they were also having a release party, complete with Hershey’s Kisses with orange wrapping and black stripes.

Unfortunately, I have an online physics assignment that it would be prudent to finish before installing a new operating system on my computer. Ahh, well… I have something to look forward to later tonight.