This is an OS/X widget for monitoring the sites woot.com, wine.woot.com, shirt.woot.com, kids.woot.com, and sellout.woot.com. If you're not sure what that is or why you should bother, I recommend going to those sites and reading up on it. If you just want to look at the widget, there are more screen shots available by clicking on the image to the right.
Without further ado, here is the latest widget:
4.1.1 provides "woot-off" visuals for all woot sites.
Q: I would like to monitor more than one woot site at a time. How do I run more than one instance of the widget and point each to a different woot site?
A: To start another instance of any widget, open the dashboard, then on the lower left hand corner of the screen, there's a plus sign in a circle. Click that, and the widget bar should appear, with all the widgets you have installed. Scroll until you find the woot widget — and clicking on it will create another instance.
Each instance has independent settings, and the site to monitor is on a drop down called "Mode" on the back of the widget, where the settings are.
Q: How do I get Growl to work? How can I select Growl if it's greyed out?
A: When the dashboard first starts up, the widget loads and checks to see if Growl is installed and operational. If it isn't, Growl won't be available to the widget. So if Growl starts after the dashboard, the dashboard needs to be restarted if it's going to use Growl. This can be done from the command line, by typing "killall Dock" (note the capital D.)
Often when this occurs, it's because Growl, for some reason, isn't running. Best to check that first, then try reloading the widget (as above or with Command-R.)
Q: The widget isn't working! What do I do?
A: The most common reason isn't anything you've done wrong, but if it's blank or some of the text or images, then it's usually one of two things: Woot is broken, or Woot changed something. To figure out if woot is broken, just go to the appropriate woot site -- it's not unusual for their servers to experience heavy loads and break sometimes. There's not much the widget can do about this.
On the other hand, if woot changed something, this is usually noticed and an update is produced. On the back of the widget in the lower right hand corner, there's a version number. First, check to see if you have the latest by comparing it to the version above. (Note that the widget will check for updates automatically, and notify you using Growl, if you have that turned on.) If you already have the latest version, and it's not working, and woot is, email the address at the bottom of this page.
I'm going to start removing links to old versions, mainly due to a few (and as far as I can tell, pointless) bots that download them regularly in their entirety. I don't think anybody will lose sleep over this; the version history will remain here.
4.1.0 adds support for the new "kids.woot". Many thanks to Hal Hockersmith for the bulk of the work.
4.0.0 changes a few key things: first, the RSS feed is used instead of the HTML screen, which should insulate the widget from future changes to the website. Second, a "woot-off" should be visible in the small version of the widget. Third, it changed the subtitle text back from the "teaser" text to the subtitle. Thanks to Hal Hockersmith for the update.
3.5.4 has been adapted to the radical changes at woot (note: woot-offs may not work; there hasn't been a woot-off since the changes.)
3.5.3 updates the woot-off percentage to accomodate a recent change
3.5.2 updates the widget to locate pictures in their new locations
3.5.1 updates parsing to handle multiple item pictures on a page, as happened on sellout.woot.com recently.
3.5.0 switches to asynchronous retrieval of woot -- which should alleviate the widget seeming to freeze or go blank when woot is slow or down
3.3.0 fixes an issue where woot changed a tag, and the widget showed a blank
3.2.9 cleans up some outdated logic and updates the way the shirt.woot image is displayed
3.2.8 fixes a problem with sellout.woot where the screen would be blank
3.2.7 corrects an obscure math error that affected its ability to determine if there's an update. So, this takes care of the nonsensical daily update notice.
3.2.6 We all knew this day would come; sellout.woot.com has been changed again. This version figures out how to cope with that.
3.2.5 if you've ever woken up in the middle of the night and thought "huh, that's something I'd better fix," then this might make sense to you. This version corrects a subtle bug regarding preferences and multiple instances of the widget. I'm not sure if anybody would ever want to run two versions of this same widget to monitor the same woot site, but if it ever comes up, this version makes such a thing behave as you would expect.
3.2.4 fixes two "almost gone" issues -- a notification problem and one ugly, ugly graphic.
3.2.3 is now available --
3.2.2 fixes some niggling issues:
3.2.1 is a minor update that simplifies and speeds up the retrieval of sellout.woot.com. It no longer appears necessary to poke Yahoo! Shopping to get it to behave itself.
3.2.0 adds two major upgrades:
Oho! Looks like Woot made some changes to how images are served. Version 3.1.4 should take care of that.
3.1.3 fixes a bug wherein preferences were not always retrieved properly
3.1.2 adds support for shirts.woot.com. It's really not my intention to generate new versions every few minutes, but I was working on it anyway, and at the end of the last woot-off, there it was -- a new woot site.
3.1.1 takes care of a weird little problem with showing item images with ampersands in them.
Occasionally, it would stop sending growl notifications, I believe that's fixed, too.
Probably the most striking thing is the new "woot off" visuals, which include a % remaining display.
3.0.9 should make it a little more resilient to changes on the Woot! site, and should therefore eliminate the blank widgets that people have been experiencing
3.0.8 has been significantly rewritten, to the extent that it doesn't resemble the original code much. Aside from the essentially invisible stuff like tightening up some of the code, this version adds a few significant features:
2.0.1 has been updated to support wine.woot.com as well. Rather than flip back and forth, I imagine people who care about both sites will simply use two instances of the widget.
1.2.7 is (most likely) the last release of the old branch; it's only slightly changed from the old code, but I got it working again after the woot site changed.
For comments, suggestions, questions, or other types of support, feel free to email me here.