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!

Today I decided to not actively maintain the projects on my tool-garage.de website any longer. This includes all the tgc*-projects like tgcSimplePoll and tgcCalendar. The main reasons for this are:

• I’m not a student anymore but have a full-time job, so I do a lot less private or freelance projects, where I used to utilize these classes/libraries
• spare-time is rare and I mostly use it to write articles, poke around with interesting new stuff and sometimes also to relax

From now on I will use this blog to write about my projects and my personal website to keep track of them.

If anyone of you frequently uses one of the mentioned projects and wants to maintain it in the future, please get in contact with me.