UoW IT Status Widget

The IT Services home page shows the status of all the services provided by ITS divided in to related groups. This widget displays this information on the Mac OS X Dashboard.

Get it

Click here to download.

This widget doesn't work on versions of Mac OS X lower than 10.4.3. If you're using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, the widget installer appears. Click Install if you want the widget installed on your Mac. If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive and open it to show the widget installer.

Manual

N.B. Some service titles have changed since the images used here were made.

Front (normal view)

When lit indicates a newer version is available. Click to get the new version.
The main status indicator. Clicking this indicator will open the IT Services home page in your default web browser. A blue background indicates that the over all status is not known. Otherwise three colours are used to represent the over all service status:
- Red: The status of one of more services is red .
- Amber: The status of one or more services is amber. There are no services with a status of red.
- Green: The status of all services is green.
For a fuller description of what each colour indicates see here.
When lit indicates that you have chosen to exclude some services from the status information.
Click to switch to expanded view.
If you can see this it means that last attempt to retrieve status information failed. Likely reasons for it to be displayed are that you do not have a working network connection or the IT Services website did not respond within 30 seconds.
Flip the widget over to show the back.

Front (expanded view)

Service status indicators. Blue indicates that the status of the service is not known. Otherwise three colours are used to represent the over all service status:
- Red: There is a serious problem with the service.
- Amber: There is some sort of problem with the service but not bad enough to show red.
- Green: The service is running as normal.
- Grey: You have chosen not to be notified of the service's status.
For a fuller description of what each colour indicates here. Clicking on a service when it is green will open the IT Services webpage for that service in your default web browser. Clicking on a service when it is amber or red will open the webpage describing the incident in your default web browser.
Click to switch to normal view.

Back

Version number.
If you are not interested in knowing the status of a particular service untick the relevant box. (The widget will not let you untick all services at the same time.) Services you untick will not be shown in grey on the front of the widget and will not influence the main status indicator. I.E. if all services were green except for phones which were red and you had unticked phones, then the main status indicator would be green. The unticking of services will not be reflected on the front of the widget until the next status update.
Untick this is if you do not want to be notified when a new version of the widget is available.
Click to open a webpage containing this information in your default web browser.
Flip the widget over to show the front.

FAQ

Where do I sent feedback, bug reports, criticisms, beer?

mike.willis@warwick.ac.uk.

How often does the widget check the service status?

When the widget is loaded and every five minutes after that. The widget does not check status whilst dashboard is inactive. If you deactivate dashboard and then reactivate it less than five minutes since the last successful check then the next check is done five minutes after dashboard was activated.

Where does the widget get the status information from?

The information is obtained by scraping the IT Services homepage. Hence if the IT Services homepage were to be redesigned the widget may stop working.

Where does the widget store it's preferences?

~/Library/Preferences/widget-net.megaflexdestiny.widget.itstatus.plist

Does the widget identify itself in anyway when retrieving the status?

Yes. The http request includes a userAgent string of "IT Status Widget http://www.warwick.ac.uk/~cusey/itstatuswidget" If you object to that for some reason then you'll have to exert the effort to work out how to change it.

How often does the widget check for new versions?

When it's loaded and at 24 hour intervals after that. (Loaded = first time you activate dashboard after logging in or if you unload then reload the widget.)

Does the widget send any data when it checks for a new version?

Nope. It just grabs a the latest version number to compare against it's own version number. If you dislike the idea of the widget 'phoning home' then disable the check for new versions.

Known Issues

In Leopard the New Versions option is on top of the More and Done buttons. I have not as yet been able to figure out why in order to correct it.
Activating dashboard immediately after the machine has been asleep for more than five minutes can result in the 'data failure' message being displayed. This is probably because the network interface hasn't had time to re-establish before the data retrieval attempt is made.
When expanding or contracting the widget part of the services list appears outside of the black area. I know why this is, I just can't find a solution to it.