Updated: there is a bug in the tool, but really it's on NWTel's side. Their https certificate is misconfigured on the usage site. To make the widget work you have to login to the usage site (using Safari) and when it warns you of the certificate error you need to say you trust the certificate they have been issued. The widget will work perfectly after this confirmation.
I just finished putting the final touches on the little dashboard widget I use to keep track of my NWTel cable data usage.
In this release I have made some very minor wording changes, simplified the configuration and improved the ability of the widget to actually pull down data from the NWTel usage site.
This is mostly unsupported software - in so much that it works for me and with my testing on my machine. Throw support requests into the comments section and I will try to be fairly responsive.
It's somewhat ironic that my widget uses an https connection and the website itself uses http; not that it matters, but a MAC address could be used for nefarious purposes...
You could just use Safari's ability to pull a piece of a webpage and create a widget for it but this is more fun and I like the way the gauge fills up as more of your data cap is used!
I had some spare cycles today so I decided to kick the tires on Dashcode - the Dashboard "widget" creation tool that you can use in OS 10.4 and later. The widgets are little applications that sit in your Dashboard and can do simple or complex tasks.
I decided to create a little widget that displays my bandwidth usage for the current month. This widget will post the request to my ISP (Northwestel Cable) and then display a little gauge to indicate how close I am getting to going over my usage cap and incurring usage charges.
It was fun to play with Dashcode but I have to say it is a little buggy (controls stop responding in the IDE after a while) and the help is rather sparse - or at least the stuff I like was not great. The environment is HTML, Javascript and CSS. I definitely wouldn't want to call coding in this environment a full time job as it is just too unstable for long term development efforts.
So - if you are on NWTel Cable - download the little widget - configure your MAC address, choose your Usage Cap and never have to view the NWTel Cable website again!
