NL Smith

Projects

College Football Widget

College football is a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X which provides the current football schedule for I-A and I-AA NCAA teams.

You can choose the team of your choice from the preferences. The data and team logos are downloaded from ESPN.

Download

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (or higher) 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.

Updates

Version 1.3.5 - November 14, 2008

Fixed bug that caused some Big 12 schedules to not display.

Version 1.3.4 - September 22, 2008

Some display bug fixes.
Fixed the stats link.

College Football Widget wins Softpedia 100% CLEAN Award - November 8, 2007

Version 1.3.3 - November 3, 2007

Sometime in the past year, either Apple or Adobe somehow changed the way Flash movies load in Dashboard Widgets. Since then the team logos have not been loading correctly. They now are loaded in an alternative way. Because of this not all logos are currently displayed. If your team's logo is not displayed, contact me and it will be added. (You won't need to download a new copy of the Widget, either.)
The team name is now displayed.

Version 1.3.2 - December 2, 2006

The problem with showing the logos has been fixed. This has been tested on Mac OS 10.4.8 on PowerPC.
Cleaned up the Ruby script a little.

Version 1.3.1 - November 19, 2006

A change on ESPN.com had caused the schedules to display incorrectly. This has been fixed.

Version 1.3 - September 23, 2006

Follows Apple's new widget submission process.
The window is now large enough to accommodate twelve game seasons.

Version 1.2 - October 8, 2005

The background image now has a subtle bit of shading.
If your clock is set to US Central, Mountain, or Pacific time, the game times will be in local time. All other timezones show US Eastern.
The Atlantic 10 conference teams now all have logos.
The schedule table is now center aligned.

Version 1.1 - October 2, 2005

Now includes I-A and I-AA teams.
Added a team logo for Mississippi State.
Added a version.plist file so I know which version I'm using.

Version 1.0 - September 26, 2005

Initial release.

Limitations and Bugs

This widget works, but is not finished. The remaining issues are as follows:

Caching and automatic refreshing are not implemented. This means the only time the schedule is reloaded is when restarting or going to the preferences.
The whole widget depends on web scraping, which means that the program breaks if ESPN changes their pages. So far this has not been a problem and the widget has worked for the 2005 and 2006 seasons.
It could be prettier. And faster.
Some I-AA teams do not have logos. This is true of both this widget and ESPN.com. I will manually add these gradually.

Please contact me if you have any more sugguestions, bugs, or ideas.

Acknowledgements

This widget would not be possible without the help and inspiration of others. Here are a few:

This widget includes Ben Giddings's htmltokenizer library used to process the downloaded tables.
I decided to write this widget after seeing Justin Williams's Purdue Football widget. It's nice, but why not work for every team?
ESPN for making schedules and logos available and for not shutting this site down (yet).
Alex Edelman, for providing some excellent hints on making widget graphics.
Apple, for their excellent Dashboard development resources and example widgets.
Steve Splonskowski modified the script to adjust the time zone.
LogoServer, for making available logos for I-AA teams I've never heard of.