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Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

I talked to a guy who knows a guy who hangs out with the guy who guards the final release software locker night and day. He agreed to look the other way while I slip this blog entry onto Earthling. It's ok, I helped him out of a misunderstanding involving Google and a pair of pliers. He owes me.

Mac beta testers wanted...

It's usually pretty tough to get a look at EarthLink software before it makes its way out into the world unless you work here. One of the reasons we created Earthling was as a way to show you some stuff ahead of time, and get some feedback on what you like and don't like about it and what we can do better as we plan our next steps. We have other ways of doing that as formal research processes, but talking to Earthling readers is a little more conversational, and helps to make sure we're talking to all the right people. I hope to have more sneak previews and beta releases you can help us with as time goes on.

Today, we're releasing a beta of a new Mac Dashboard app called EarthLink Shopping Widget. It's a tool that allows you to search and comparison shop on eBay.com, Amazon.com, and Shopping.com all from the Dashboard instead of your web browser. If you flip the widget over (click the "i") and give it your zip code, it will also show you the shipping costs of eBay auction items when you roll over the price. We think it's pretty unique as far as Dashboard widgets go.

You can download it at: http://my.earthlink.net/shoppingwidget/.

All Mac users are welcome -- you don't have to be a pre-existing EarthLink customer to use it. Please grab it, install it, play around with it, and tell us what you think. All bug reports, feature suggestions, rants, and raves are encouraged -- just post a comment on this blog entry. The whole point of showing it to you early is to get your feedback so that we can incorporate it into our development plans. The miniShopper's proud papa and developer, Chris "insanely useful" Holland, will be around to participate in the discussion.

Although we'd ideally like to have something for everyone, since it's a Dashboard widget it will only work on Mac OS X. I'll have other stuff coming up that Windows users can play around with too.

Also, please keep in mind that this is *beta* and not yet final release software, but we trust it enough to install it on our moms' computers and let them shop at will.

Update: Chris nerds it up over on The Apple Blog about the development process.

Comments

nifty concept... still seems a mite buggy though:
http://www.djenigma.com/images/earthlink_shopping_widget_weirdness.jpg

also, if you want to support both windows and mac... look into konfabulator. it was bought by yahoo so i'm not sure how earthlink would feel about building a widget that will only run inside yahoo software... but eh. it's multiplatform, and konfabulator was around way before dashboard. :)

Posted by shawn reed | June 15, 2006 6:58 PM

Shawn: for some strange reason, tool tips in Dashboard have an occasional tendency to "hang out" longer than they should. I might remove a few of them if this becomes a common complaint. Thanks for pointing this out.

Point well-taken regarding Yahoo/Konfab :)

Posted by chris holland | June 15, 2006 7:44 PM

thanks for the quick reply chris! actually the tooltip was probably just an oversight on my part.. i probably snapped the shot too quick. i was more pointing out the fact that i was searching for 'plasma tv' and got several things not even remotely related. :) the search algorithm may need a bit of tweaking. as i said, i think it's a great concept though! i can see a lot of people using something like this... myself included.

Posted by shawn reed | June 15, 2006 7:48 PM

Oh that! :) Yes! I've been working on various tweaks to my calls to the Amazon API, to filter out less relevant stuff. This should get fixed soon. Good catch :)

Posted by chris holland | June 15, 2006 7:55 PM

This is a great idea. I love so many things about this shopping tool. It is clean and well designed- not too many words- no extra text- The design is also snappy and interesting. I get frustrated with shooping on amazon or ebay or even google. There is always a lot to do- entering passwords names more and more stuff. When I want to shop, I want to do just that- quickly. I will use this tool and love the way it just zooms in whenever I am ready to shop. Good work.

Posted by evelyn dorbor | June 15, 2006 8:19 PM

How can I delete this from my Dashboard? I don't like it.

Posted by Ralph Beal | August 20, 2006 1:27 PM

Hi Ralph,

Apple has a standard way for you to remove widgets. Here's an Apple support page that tells you how to do it and I've pasted the relevant instructions below:

In Dashboard, open the Widget Bar by clicking the plus sign (+) button.
Click the Manage Widgets button on the left side of the screen, or click the Widgets widget in the Widget Bar.
Widget Manager appears and displays a list of all your installed widgets.
Deselect the checkbox next to any widget that you want to make disappear from Dashboard. You can sort widgets in the Widget Manager by name or by added date (this doesn't change their order in the Widget Bar).
Note: Deselecting a widget in Widget Manager disables it so that it doesn't appear in Dashboard, but it doesn't completely delete the widget from your computer.
To remove third-party widgets [which includes the Shopping Widget], click the red remove button (it looks like a red circle with a horizontal white line through it) to the right of the widget. When you do, this alert appears:

"(Name of widget) Move this widget to the Trash?"

Click OK to remove the widget from Dashboard and put it in the Trash.

Posted by Dave C. | August 21, 2006 11:21 AM

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