Beolingus dashboard widget

Some of you supposedly know about Leo, the online-translation service founded by some students of the TU München. Another nice translation-service is Beolingus provided by the TU Chemnitz. I already had the dashboard-widget for Leo installed on my Mac. However, I was disappointed to find out there was no such thing for Beolingus. Disappointed enough to build one on my own. You can find some details here or also directly download it here. The widget allows to enter the term to be translated and shows you the results in your browser.

The Apple developer howtos provide lots of information on how to create dashboard widgets. But luckily I didn’t have to read all that stuff because the folks at Apple provide an IDE named Dashcode that is pretty much straightforward. It aids you in editing widget meta information, craeting a preview image, etc. All you have to know is how to use JavaScript and some HTML and CSS. Ok, you need to lookup some API to find out about how to persistently store widget properties, etc. But after all, developing a simple widget like that is pretty easy. Nice!