I was looking through Oikos–I think the most popular Taiwanese mac site-- and came across this:
It’s a Taiwanese map widget. My Chinese isn’t quite that good, but lets say I copy and paste the address of the Tavern, and I want to find near by bars, that’s all I need to know.
Thanks! That’s cool
Super sweet. I love my Mac and I love widgets. Now I wonder what it would take to get it translated into English/Pinyin?
I’ll get around to it someday. The problem is only the interface can be translated. So that drop down you see at the bottom to select nearby Pubs, 7-11’s and such can be turned into English.
You still need to type the address in Chinese. And all the map data is retrieved from www.map.com.tw; it’s Taiwanese only.
That site does provide English maps, but my luck with typing in pinyin wasn’t too great. You have to get the way they like to spell it just right. But who knows, it’s probably possible.
I just took a look at the English web site again. It works ok though there are no features for nearby stuff. It’s strictly a map. So yeah, that’s easily made into a dashboard.
I know my mac came with widget making stuff, but I haven’t explored it yet. Even if you could translate the interface into English and the info button stuff, it would be super fantastic.
I was just looking at the code. Widgets are javascript and html. Even the contents for dropdown list at the bottom are retrieved from the web site.
That part is pretty much the only thing that can be translated. I thought it might have just been translating some text. But it would be a bit more. Not sure if I’ll feel like getting around to it someday. I still have a real mac app I started during early summer but haven’t touched in more than a month now.
If you want to look at the code, look for the widget in
~/Library/Widgets
right(control)-click and choose Show Package Contents. The code in question is in taiwan_map.js.
I’d be interested in hearing about this project of yours.
Just a book reader. I took some HTML pages off the web, reformatted them, and then made a program. I can change books with a menu and then choose chapter and section from the toolbar. That much is working so far.
The code is really a mess and it’s far from what I hope to eventually make it. There are a lot of free books on the web, lots of them HTML pages, lots of things like Project Gutenberg just text files. I was hoping for something to organize them.
I might try some things as soon as my translator gets home. I’m a wiz photoshop, i’ll see what I can do.
Cool. I think though it’s more programming than anything else. The widget is a front end for the web site. So you’d need to modify the code. Someone that knew javascript really well could probably do it in a couple hours or less. It’d take me a lot longer. 
For the Accuweather site that the weather widget in Dashboard uses, Taiwanese cities are spelled in Hanyu pinyin (yeah!!!) and mixed with other mainland Chinese cities (boo!!!)
Found another cool Dashboard Widget today. This one shows the schedule for most TV channels in Taiwan. It’s all in Chinese, which doesn’t really help if you can’t read Chinese or if you want to know what movie is on HBO, but it’s pretty useful for anything else.
Finding this Widget nearly makes up for going into Taibei this weekend and seeing the model of iMac that I bought less than a month ago being sold for $10,000NT less (probably to clear way for the new iMacs with Front Row and iSight cameras). :fume: :fume: