Scoreboard Dashboard Widget
I’ve joined the widget making madness with this simple widget. It downloads the current Major League Baseball scores and automatically scrolls through them or gives you the option of displaying a single game. You can open multiple copies and set the to different games to track more that one without having to wait for them to come around with the scrolling.. It is basic but that’s kind of the point of widgets. If you want more stats, you can click on any game and it will take you to the game’s page on foxsports.com.
Posted by Ryan on May 8, 2005
Douglas Head says:
Great concept, but it doesn’t work on my computer. I try to drag it out of the widget tray and nothing happens; I click on its icon in the tray and I get a system beep. Have no idea why. Using Tiger on a PowerMac G4/400Mhz.
May 9th, 2005 at 6:30 am
tony says:
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make one of these for college football. you have a few months. PLEASE
i’ll give you a million dollars.
maybe not, but PLEASE one for college football,
college basketball would be nice too,
thanks
tony w
May 10th, 2005 at 2:34 am
Vishal Goklani says:
I like your widget, but I would prefer if you linked the games to ESPN and not Fox Sports. ESPN has a feed for cell phones; presumably you could steal the scores from there. You got also make the scoreboards more graphical, and make them look like actual scoreboards (like in Fenway). You can also show who’s pitching, and who the current batters. It would also be cool if we could follow select teams, like the Red Sox (or Yankees).
May 11th, 2005 at 12:47 am
bob says:
this widget nearly blows my soxs off. thanks so much for making it. it can be a drag waiting through the listings to pause it (esp. if you break concentration for a few seconds and miss your team(s)).
keep up the great stuff.
May 11th, 2005 at 1:17 am
Dustin says:
Nice widget. However, I would like to track just one team, and see more detail of their game in the widget. Maybe a watered down version of ESPN’s Gameday live game tracking? Anyways, thanks for making this available!
May 11th, 2005 at 2:51 pm
Scott Nicholas says:
Great widget, but a lot of people dont care about the entire MLB. It should be able to be set to only show us 2 or 3 teams. Also, it should show those teams ranking, W/L, and games behind.
May 11th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
Gabe Stein says:
Well, I like it a lot! I’ve been looking for one for a while, and yours works, so it gets my vote.
BTW, I’ve heard Austin is one of the best cities in terms of free wireless networks. My aunt lives there, but she’s not very tech-savvy, so I’m not sure if these reports are true. Next time I go down there though, I’ll take my laptop and check it out…I’ll also make sure NOT to be stung by a scorpion this time…
-Gabe
May 12th, 2005 at 8:56 am
Yanquis Fan says:
awesome work dude, totally making dashboard well worth the upgrade. i would only have 2 feature requests, if it’s too tough, or you don’t wanna bother, i won’t complain, but it would be nice to have choice of font, and a choice of what web site to go to when clicking for a box score, I usually prefer ESPN, or Yahoo, where my fantasy teams are, but either way, this widget rocks the party that rocks the bod-day!
May 12th, 2005 at 9:11 pm
Nate says:
I’d like to see the pause scrolling button (that was in .2) return. It was really great. Keep up the good work!
May 12th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
Administrator says:
Nate,
After I reorganized to allow for more of the scrolling to be visible, I found that there was nowhere to put the pause button. Also, since you can now set up the widget to show one game all the time, combined with the ability to open up multiple copies of the widget I decided that the pause functionality wasn’t necessary anymore. I’m sure it would be usefull every once in a while but not enough to justify the real estate on the widget.
May 12th, 2005 at 9:38 pm
David DuBois says:
You know, I was just ranting today to my dad how someone needed to create a scoreboard widget for MLB games, and then this appeared. Nice work, though I wish there were more stats. It’s got great potential though!
May 12th, 2005 at 9:39 pm
Lance says:
Good work Ryan. As soon I load Tiger, this was the first and only widget that I’ve cared about. And now I have it. Contrary to opinions above, the simplicity is great.
Meaningless recommendations: add ability to adjust the scroll speed (too slow for me); and maybe change the color or clear background.
Cheers!
May 13th, 2005 at 12:32 am
Mike says:
I too am a big fan of this widget. Thanks much for making it! My only suggestion/request would be the ability to track one or two teams. Gotta keep up on my White Sox!
May 13th, 2005 at 3:16 am
John Williams says:
Your Apple.com download is not working.
May 13th, 2005 at 8:56 am
Caleb says:
So far I don’t see much difference in Tiger other the Widgets and Spotlight, but that I LOVE!! It will help me be able to find my photos with great ease now. It searches meta tag data in photos. How awesome is that!!!
May 13th, 2005 at 9:51 am
Administrator says:
John,
Maybe it was just network congestion or something. I just tried it and it works.
May 13th, 2005 at 11:47 am
Randy says:
Thanks I like it a lot. Would be even better if you could choose the games you wished to track not just one game but any number. That way the games of no interest could be left out of the scrolling and you could see the ones that you wished to see with greater frequency. As Earl Waever said “There are two kinds of baseball fans Yankee fan and Yankee haters. I am in the later category!” I root for my teams and whoever is playing against the Yankees! So It would be nice to be able to pick and choose.
May 13th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Robert says:
thank you so much! i’ve been asking for this since dashboard was announced.
go A’s!
May 13th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
Jamie says:
dude, well done. I HAVE BEEN WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THIS !!
May 13th, 2005 at 12:55 pm
Caleb says:
wait wait wait, I did not realize you made this yourself dude! How do you make a Widget?
May 13th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
Caleb says:
Dude do you ralize this widget is featured on the Apple web site?
May 13th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
Administrator says:
Dude yes, I realized it was featured. I think that’s why my comments for this post have doubled the total comments for my whole site. I was pretty shocked that is was featured. It’s even the featured download on the main downloads page, not just the widgets area. I was pretty excited. Anyway, there is a link on the apple developer page that tells how to make one. It’s basically a webpage.
May 13th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
Doug says:
To add onto Randy’s comment, instead of selecting games, you should be able to select teams to follow, and another selection for “all AL” or “all NL” would be nice too. Just dropping my 2 cents worth. Awesome Widget!!!!!!
May 13th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
Jenny says:
This widget is great! I love being able to click the Dashboard button and see the scores instead of having to cycle to a webpage.
I know you’ve gotten a lot of requests and I hate to be picky since I’ll use it anyway, but if you can, it would be great if the user could set the scrolling speed. Or is the scrolling speed network-dependent? (I tried it earlier it was too fast; I went back and it was too slow…)
May 13th, 2005 at 6:35 pm
rsjm says:
This was one of the widgets I’ve been waiting for. Thanks!
May 13th, 2005 at 6:49 pm
Eddy Peters says:
How am I supposed to tell when a particular team is hitting or on pitching? Without this info, the runners on base graphic is useless. Also, ball count should have four bubbles, not three. Same for the strike/out counts; need three, not two bubbles.
Other than that, this is a very handy widget that I’ve been waiting for since Tiger came out. Keep up the good work!
May 13th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
Ryan says:
Eddy,
The away team is always on top and bats at the top of the inning. The easy way to remember is that at the top of an inning, the top team is batting and at the bottom of the inning the bottom team is batting. Also, about the bubbles, I won’t go so far as to say no scoreboards use four dots for balls, but I will say I have never seen one that uses four dots for balls, and three for strikes and outs. You never see the fourth ball because at that point, the at bat is over and the count is empty for the next batter. Same with outs, as soon as you get three outs, it’s the next team’s bat with no outs.
May 13th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
Red Sox Fan says:
Fantastic, works great. Great as is, but if you do add features I’d love it if you could pick a division and then every day it displays the games being played by that divisions teams.
May 13th, 2005 at 11:15 pm
Hutch says:
Great widget just one problem. Can you make it that enables you to choose teams, such as the AL East. Can you also make it that when the new games pop up they stick to the previous settings. Other than that, it is great.
May 14th, 2005 at 11:05 am
Matthew says:
Thanks for this widget. It works great on my new iMac G5. The only suggestion I have is to allow switching to different sports. That would be the best! Thanks again!
May 14th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
swiller says:
How the heck do I install this? and why does know one supply simple instructions! some of are new to dashboard and not computer geeks. make it simple for us please!
May 14th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
Zach says:
Swiller, it couldn’t be any easier. If you are in Safari just hit the download link.
As for this widget, it is great. Some welcome additions, as people said, would be option of provider, division/league/team views (so my favorite team is always on), and (no one as mentioned this) time zone support. I already do enough converting from the Eastern time zone in a day between TV and other internet sites. Great work, let’s get these done for other sports! ;-)
May 14th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Benito67 says:
Thanks for developing this.
Truly a very useful widget!
Keep up the good work…
May 16th, 2005 at 12:40 am
Erik says:
I love the new team tracking option. Keep up the good work. Might be nice to also be able to track the division standings (and later in the season — the magic number) for your team. That might be a separate widget, though.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:18 am
chelseaclinton says:
Thanks. I now have three months to figure out how to modify this widget to display scores of English Premier League matches.
May 16th, 2005 at 5:37 pm
Joel says:
Just wanted to say thanks a million for a really nice widget. (Feeling any love for us college baseball fiends, too?)
Great job!
May 16th, 2005 at 6:27 pm
Red Sox Fan says:
Team option is great, makes it easy to create your own divisional scoreboard, and its not bogged down with toronto or tampa scores
May 16th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
uurf says:
nice widget. btw, Pittsburgh PA is spelled with an “h” (unlike Pittsburg CA).
May 16th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
uurf says:
well, that was easy enough to fix.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:35 pm
Ryan says:
uurf,
Well now it’s fixed for everyone. I’m pretty sure there’s no more typos.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:56 pm
Benjamin Hagan says:
how did you find the foxsports xml feed of game data? are there other team specific feeds from foxsports that go into a little more detail, maybe showing past results and upcoming games, or maybe news headlines. i am interested in developing a more detailed single team widget where a couple team news headlines are shown, a game tracker field like yours will be shown, and a 7 day calendar with that day’s game and the three previous results and three upcoming games are listed. any help identifying feeds to tap into would be a great help.
May 18th, 2005 at 3:00 pm
Dan says:
MAKE MORE WIDGETS
Ths is one of the only widgets i have downloaded and acually keep on my dashboard. PLEASE MAKE MORE!
May 20th, 2005 at 9:26 am
buck says:
Is this working for anyone else behind a proxy?
It’s just a solid shade of green for me, after installing. Is it because I’m behind a proxy? The other dashboard apps don’t seem to have a problem. Can you code this so that it pulls proxy settings from the system prefs?
-Buck
May 20th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
Ryan says:
Buck,
I’m not sure about the proxy thing. I wouldn’t think that would affect anything though since I use the same method to retrieve the file as everyone else. I’m pretty sure things like the weather widget don’t care about proxies either but I could be wrong. I don’t really know much about them.
May 20th, 2005 at 4:30 pm
David Yeh says:
Not sure if this has been mentioned, but it seems that settings are not saved and do not survive a logout or restart. I have three duplicate widgets set up, one each to track a different team, and yet everytime I logout and back in, it is reset to default settings and I have to recustomize, which ruins what is otherwise a fantastic widget! And I agree, similar widgets for other sports should follow…
thanks!
May 21st, 2005 at 7:52 pm
William says:
Awesome widget. I’m going to repeat a lot of other comments here, but, yeah, I’d like to just track one team. Awesome job, though! Regardless… I love this widget.
May 23rd, 2005 at 10:50 am
Ryan says:
William,
Do you have the most recent version? It allows you to track just one team.
May 23rd, 2005 at 11:45 am
Dave says:
I love this widget, but why doesn’t it keep prefs between logins? It defaults to the “scroll all” behavior.
May 23rd, 2005 at 4:41 pm
josh o says:
Great idea, thanks. I assume this just checks with a website for it’s data…I wonder if there’s a way to specialize it for Japanese teams. If so, you’ll have have lots of happy people over here! Thanks!
May 24th, 2005 at 12:26 am
Buck says:
Just to follow up in case anyone else has proxy probs, although I’m not certain why the proxy issues are solved, I managed to get Scoreboard working when I switched from an Automatic Proxy Detection to a Web Proxy HTTP server explicitly.
-Buck
May 24th, 2005 at 1:57 pm
Nate says:
I would love to see the abiltiy to track more than one team. I have one I like where I live, and one where I don’t.
BTW, that rocks man. Now I can drop the Yahoo! SMS stuff I get on my phone. Yay!
May 25th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
mr. blackandwhite says:
Awesome job. Just wanted to say thank you for your efforts. I really like what you have done. Use it every day. Thanks again.
May 27th, 2005 at 9:28 am
Eric H. says:
Widget works well (1.2 version) on my tiBook.
A “standings” option or separate widget would be a great addition.
Also, listing who is playing where: Twins @ Toronto for instance.
Thanks for the good stuff!
May 27th, 2005 at 11:25 am
Ryan says:
Eric,
The away team is always on top.
May 27th, 2005 at 11:26 am
Brian says:
Love the widget!!
But making it more tweakable would be great. For instance being able to choose between national or american league teams. Or being able to choose which teams to display.
Keep up the great work!!
May 27th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
David says:
Version 1.2 now saves prefs, and makes the team at bat clearer. Excellent improvements!
May 28th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Zach says:
Way to make it on Forbes.com Ryan!
June 1st, 2005 at 11:38 am
jonathan says:
Please for college football and for the NFl. Its a great widget. thanks.
June 2nd, 2005 at 10:49 am
bruce says:
This is a very cool widget, thanks!!
I did notice a problem that you should know about… when using iChat, normally I’ll get a bit rate of ~300k and a frame rate of 15. However, I found when running this widget, the frame rate went to 1.0, and the bit rate to 60, and my CPU monitor shows that both my 1.8GHz G5’s were maxed out… uninstalling the scoreboard widget (1.2) resolved the performance problem, but left me w/o the scoreboard :-(
June 3rd, 2005 at 1:33 am
Ryan says:
Bruce,
I’m not sure what the problem could be, the widget is inactive when it is hidden, so it shouldn’t affect your CPU or Network at all unless you are using something like Amnesty to keep it on the desktop at all times. In that case, the Network still would not be affected any more than if you refreshed a very small site every 30, 60 or 90 seconds depending on your configuration. But if you have the widget on your desktop at all times, your CPU will take a definate hit with the scrolling, but still shouldn’t max out your CPU. I’ve only got a powerbook 1.33ghz and it uses about 20% - 30% of the CPU but only when it’s scrolling. When it’s stopped it only uses the CPU whenever it updates. Is anyone else having this problem who is not keeping on their desktop?
June 3rd, 2005 at 3:14 pm
bruce says:
Ryan,
No, I’m just using the dashboard normally - so when iChat is in use, for example, the widgets are all hidden. No Amnesty (haven’t even heard of it until now). Seems like I should do more testing. But in the single case I reported, it was very dramatic, and I decided to remove the last thing I added to the system, which was the scoreboard widget, and the results were almost instantaneous (iChat gradually sped up to 15fps over the course of about 15 seconds), and the CPU usage level (measured by activity monitor) dropped immediately.
Feel free to email “offline” if you prefer.
June 4th, 2005 at 7:50 pm
Ravi says:
(originally posted by accident to “Schoooools out for summer!” widget section)
Ryan,
I love the Baseball widget. However, with the latest version 1.2 it seems to not always be able to reconnect. After the computer being idle for sometime when I call up widgets I get a frozen screen that is usually blank green, the other widgets I have are fine. The only way to get scores is to reload the widget. I am running 10.4.1 on dual 2.5 GHZ G5, and I have an always on cable connection at work. Any ideas??’
R
June 5th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
bruce says:
Ryan,
Ok, I’ve done some more testing with scoreboard, and iChat - and this time, no degradation problems with iChat, no excess CPU activity with the widget. Looks like the scoreboard widget uses 0% CPU when the dashboard is inactive, and it goes to about 20% when the dashboard is active. I had no bandwidth problems running an iChat session with scoreboard running today… so I guess my earlier experience was just coincidental, since I can’t reproduce it now. And the good news is, that I’m able to use the scoreboard widget to track my favorite team!
June 5th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
Bob Franklin says:
Excellent stuff. Could you add an option to display the scores (only) in other games, underneath the details of the selected game/team? I’m interested in the details of the Red Sox games but only how much the Yankees are losing by!
June 7th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Dan says:
Wow. Great job. The only thing that could make it better is adding support for different sports and adding details like the person at bat and the pitcher.
June 7th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
Zach says:
Ryan, this widget is great… It would be really cool if, like Bob said, you could see other scores real small, or like Dan says, showing more details. One way to implement Dan’s idea would be, real small, show something like B: (batter’s jersey number) P: (pitcher’s number) or whatever else you think is cool!
June 7th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
Ryan says:
I have put pretty much all of the info from the xml file I use in the widget. The other information that everyone is requesting just isn’t there. I could use a different feed, but I could not find one that has more info and doesn’t do weird things like say a game is in the bottom of the sixth on minute and then say it’s in the middle of the fifth the next time the file is downloaded.
In the end I decided that the limited info was a good thing, since the whole idea behind widgets is not to replace good websites. Foxsports.com has more info than you could want if you feel like getting major details. You can even click on a game in the widget and it will take you right to the page, which refreshes automatically too. I mainly just wanted something simple, that would give me the score and then I could go on with my work, which I feel the widget does. I do appreciate all the comments. I had not thought of many of the things that were suggested and they turned out to be really good ideas so I implemented them, but I probably won’t be adding any more info to the widget.
I will try to do other sports, mainly there just aren’t enough games going on in the sports I like to warrant a ticker type widget yet, so I would not be able to test anything I would code. I want to do a basketball one when the next season rolls around, so I can keep closer tabs on my Spurs. Right now I don’t need a widget to tell me they are beating everyone!
June 8th, 2005 at 12:56 am
Jon says:
Although I do love this widget, it would also be really cool to be able to view all the games in a division (instead of 1 team or everyone). For example I only really care about the orioles, yankees, redsox, bluejays, and devil rays. It would be nice to not have to open a widget for each.
June 9th, 2005 at 9:25 pm
Padres Fan says:
Hi Ryan!
Love the Widget, I just wish it listed the game times in my “native” time. Since I’m a lazy left-coaster, I hate how the whole world seems to exist on Eastern Time ;-)
June 10th, 2005 at 5:57 pm
Mel Gross says:
Ryan, this has been pretty good so far in 10.4 - 10.4.1, but has display problems in 10.4.2.
July 13th, 2005 at 9:34 am
Hutch says:
Does not work in 10.4.2. Please fix, I loved your widget
July 28th, 2005 at 7:36 pm
PopeSammyJoe says:
On my Powerbook if I have turned OFF my Airport card, and then inadvertently hit the Dashboard HotKey (F12 for me), Scoreboard pegs my CPU all the way. I have to 1) remove all of them from my active Widgets, 2) force kill the Dashboard Client processes.
Of all the widgets I have active, Scoreboard is the ONLY widget which behaves this way.
Other than this, I love to use it to track the Cubbies.
July 28th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
M says:
Definitely one of the best widgets made yet… PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do this for the NFL. :-D
August 16th, 2005 at 11:28 pm
Rob Lewis says:
Hi. Scoreboard is great but on my system the text starts scrolling up from below the green background. It just appears, floating in space, about an inch below the window and scrolls on up into it.
October 17th, 2005 at 1:31 pm
ed says:
This is a great widget, but I also wanted to use it for other sports so I used it as a learning example for my own scores widget. I had created a widget to show scores, but couldn’t figure out the autoscroll function so I learned from yours. I should have it out soon under the name “Sports.” Thanks for making such a great widget! I can’t believe there aren’t more of these out there.
November 28th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
bradsorensen says:
Good evening any ideas how to or can you port or convert your widget to windows please.
Scoreboard 1.2
March 30th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
Joe says:
Version 1.3: When I select a single team, the widget keeps scrolling just that team’s scores instead of sitting still like in previous versions.
April 3rd, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Ben says:
I’m getting the same bug as Joe. Not sure which version introduced the bug — I think it was in 1.2 was well.
April 4th, 2006 at 7:25 am