Geek Image is a widget for showing an image from the web in your dashboard. This is expected to be an image that will be changing regularly, like a webcam or a dynamically generated graph.

Geek Image differs from other image displaying widgets in that it will either resize itself to the image being displayed, or you can resize it to scale the image to whatever size you like. You can also adjust the refresh rate, and have it refresh at different rates when the dashboard is visible and when it is not.

Geek Image is inspired by and named after GeekTool, a truly wonderful application that lets you put images and other things in your desktop. I wanted the image functionality of GeekTool to show up in my dashboard, so I wrote Geek Image.

Geek Image version 0.3 can be downloaded here.

Mac OS X v.10.4 Tiger or later is required. If you're using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

Please send comments and bugs about Geek Image here.

Acknowledgements

Changelog

• Optionally shows a spinner while loading images.
• Now works on Leopard. (Many thanks to Jim Waters for debugging this and providing a patch.)
• Other minor bug fixes.

• Much better imagery, backside cleaned up a bit, better default sizes.
• Hopefully fixed the bug where it occasionally forgot everything when you reboot.
• Got rid of excessive debugging noise in the console.

• Initial release.

Things to do

• Modernize this page into something that looks like it wasn't written in the Dark Ages of the web.
• Fix any bugs. I think there is a bug where sometimes it won't refresh after visiting the back side unless you hide and redisplay Dashboard. I'm sure you'll find other bugs too.

Current wishlist

• Option to add a border.
• Option to restrain resizing to preserve aspect ratio.
• Option to include a catalog of webcams. I don't have a good idea for a way to do this that I like. I don't want to get into the business of building and maintaining a list like this myself. I thought about scraping a website like http://www.earthcam.com/, but it's just too big. Maybe I should just put a link to that site in the widget and leave it at that.
• As a simpler form of the above, let the user enter a list of URLs and names for them, and let them easily switch what they are viewing.