Widgety goodness
Sunday, 12th June 2005, 11:16 pmSuperseded by version 2.2.
Welcome, visitors from Dashboard Widgets! And from Apple.com, as of 12th June. Please don’t be too scared.
I suppose I should make a post about my widget here. It’s, uh, really cool. It plays radio streams from the BBC, and looks pretty smart to boot. And yes, of course I’m biased.
Any suggestions or support queries - please check out the helpful comments to this thread. I’ll try to get them organised into an FAQ. You can also send them to hawkman@phantomgorilla.com if you like. 
I’ll be submitting it to Apple soon… but their submission guidelines say I need a “specific supporting website” - so I actually have to think of some stuff to put on a page 
Oh yeah, if you didn’t come here from the widget and don’t fancy wading through the archives over at Dashboard Widgets, you can get it right here.
Update: I uploaded the widget to Apple, and it’s there right now. Quadrupled my blog traffic overnight!
June 13th, 2005 at 3:01 am Quote
Nice. But how could I use it? I need to know which stations are better
June 13th, 2005 at 6:51 am Quote
Depends what you like, Zau
I’m a big Radio 4 man myself - that’s documentaries, discussion, general thinking man’s stuff. Oh, and some great comedy at 6.30pm British time. 1’s good for mindless listening, and 7 has some good comedy and books, but some terrible “classics” that should have been left in the vault, too.
Radio 1’s pop. Radio 2 is, well, Radio 2. 3 is classical music. 5 Live & Sports Extra are sport. 6 Music is sort of trendy music. BBC 7 is comedy, drama and books. 1xtra is “urban” music… I’ve never listened to the Asian Network, and World Service is pretty much an international version of Radio 4!
So, umm, yeah. Oh, my widgets page is up now, too. Looking kinda sparse at the moment though. I’m so glad I learned html et al
June 13th, 2005 at 8:25 am Quote
It needs less metal, so it does.
Although, since it stands alone and performs the function of a physical device, maybe it should be, according to the HI guidelines.
Of course, they don’t say squat about widgets, which I think should be a no-go area for metal on general principles. Go put another selector on the back for the skin and make me a plastic version!
June 13th, 2005 at 6:50 pm Quote
Hawkman: your link is broken; you don’t have the http:// prefix.
Right now it links to [removed - I was getting emails from robots about this link and it was annoying! thanks though - Andy]
June 13th, 2005 at 7:01 pm Quote
Bah.
June 13th, 2005 at 8:40 pm Quote
I think the metal’s fine. The white buttonny bit looks a bit weird inside it though, for some reason..
Thanks anywho, let’s me drop my radio 4 only widget.
Oh, and while I’m commenting, nice website.
June 13th, 2005 at 8:41 pm Quote
Well the white buttoning part is Real Player’s interface. You can’t change that…
June 13th, 2005 at 9:05 pm Quote
Yeah. that’s the biggest problem with these realplayer streams, you have to use realplayer. If only the plugin was controllable via javascript like it’s supposed to be….
June 13th, 2005 at 10:47 pm Quote
I think it may be, actually, after all… Unfortunately, I suck at buttons. Any ideas as to how they should look?
Anyway, with a bit (well, a lot) of effort I can cover up the whitespace if I can’t get custom buttons to work, but only once I’ve decided on a final interface.
[edit] Oh yeah, and, cheers Joe.
June 14th, 2005 at 9:47 am Quote
It’s brilliant. Wonderful. Great. I love it.
I’m gonna look stupid here but……it does not work?? OK, I’m new to Macs and have a new G5 iMac… the widget is on my dash but what do you have to do to get it to work??……
June 14th, 2005 at 10:00 am Quote
It can’t hurt to assume the worst. Try this:
1. Are you connected to the internet?
2. Can you hear other sounds from your computer’s speakers?
3. Did you press the widget’s play button?
4. Do you have the latest version of realplayer for OSX
5. Have you run realplayer and had it instal its browser plugin?
If you answered yes to all those questions then you’re not stupid (besides the decidedly suspect use of punctuation) and it’s all Andy’s fault. If you answered no to any of them, then yes, you’re a bit of a goddamn retard, sorry.
June 14th, 2005 at 6:47 pm Quote
Sam: that’s a little harsh…
OFF TOPIC: Sam, let’s link our blogs to eachother
June 14th, 2005 at 10:44 pm Quote
hi there
its a great looking thing and a great idea but i cant get it to work!
it opens fine - i can do everything but get any sound. the play and stop buttons are both greyed out.
June 15th, 2005 at 3:17 am Quote
pj: did you follow Sam’s 5-item list?
It can’t hurt to assume the worst. Try this:
1. Are you connected to the internet?
2. Can you hear other sounds from your computer’s speakers?
3. Did you press the widget’s play button?
4. Do you have the latest version of realplayer for OSX
5. Have you run realplayer and had it instal its browser plugin?
If you answered yes to all those questions then you’re not stupid (besides the decidedly suspect use of punctuation) and it’s all Andy’s fault. If you answered no to any of them, then yes, you’re a bit of a goddamn retard, sorry.
June 15th, 2005 at 3:46 am Quote
Hey,
I’m out of town with work for a few days, so this is my sole tech support response for now I’m afraid. Oh yeah, and Sam’s only taking the mickey. Although, if the answer to #2 is no, then you really do suck
I’ll add one item to that list, that’s cropped up already in an email I got: firewalls.
A good place to start is Real’s own support page on firewalls: http://service.real.com/firewall/rplay.html
June 15th, 2005 at 4:57 am Quote
i thought http://real.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/real.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1273
was the answer, but i’m just not sure what the proper transport settings should be. i’ve tried a bunch and it doesn’t seem to make a difference. so perhaps the firewall’s not the real issue.
the behavior i’m seeing is that whatever station the player opens up on works fine, but if i change stations or hit the little “i” button it will gray out all buttons from then on (except mute) until i actually open another copy of the widget. perhaps what needs to happen is that the widget needs to be reconfigured to “reload” after the station is changed.
hope this is helpful feedback.
peace
June 15th, 2005 at 8:49 am Quote
You can reload a widget by pressing apple-R while the mouse is over it. It even has a nice coreimage swirl effect.
June 15th, 2005 at 1:32 pm Quote
Jones, that’s weird, not seeing it here. Anyone else got this issue? Also, have you tried just waiting? It can take a while to load the new stream. But yeah, sounds like Command-R is your friend for now.
June 15th, 2005 at 7:54 pm Quote
hi zaudragon - i check out on all five of those!
basically - the first time i drag the widget from the dock it works fine. if i flip it over and change stations i get nothing.
i kill the widget - re-drag it - and all is well… with the last selected station…
its a long way around but it still looks and is great.
i think a great feature would be to have a way of being able to play the ‘previous shows’ - something for the future maybe…
i’ve just been on dashboardwidgets.com - turns out hawkman is from derby, uk?
small world…because so am i!
June 15th, 2005 at 8:59 pm Quote
pj: previous shows won’t work. This widget uses live streams.
June 15th, 2005 at 9:01 pm Quote
Please post v1.2 on the Apple page
June 15th, 2005 at 9:38 pm Quote
Zau - the version on Apple.com is actually 1.2, because the link is a download from my webspace. It’s just the description isn’t updated yet - I won’t do that until 1.3/1.5, depending what this next release turns into.
pj - Really? That’s… surprising! Where abouts? I’m a Littleover lad.
June 15th, 2005 at 11:05 pm Quote
Derby folk on the internet? Amazing! And here I thought they were all too busy being depressed about football and looking like commoners.
And hey, what’s in store for 1.3 monkey-man?
June 16th, 2005 at 3:39 pm Quote
Well, I’ve made a few changes already - the volume will be set to max on first launch, so I should stop getting complaints about how quiet it is. Any changes you make after that’ll get remembered though. Also, I’d like to get a fix for this wretched greyed-out buttons problem, if only I could find the cause.
For 1.5 I’ll be neatening up the front of the widget, making it sleep on hide if no stream is playing, and tweaking a couple of other things. That’ll be at least a week away though, and 1.3 and 1.5 may yet become one and the same.
On a related note, from anyone who has this problem when you change streams and it stops working - I’d appreciate some more information. First try updating to the latest version of real Player from http://www.real.com. Also try deleting the widget’s preferences: ~/Library/Preferences/widget-com.phantomgorilla.widget.bbcradio.plist If that doesn’t help I’d like to know your exact OS version, whether this happens even when this widget is the only one running, and anything interesting you may have done to Dashboard or to WebKit. If it does help, I also want to know!
June 17th, 2005 at 5:59 pm Quote
Solved the weird issue with needing to reload the widget when changing streams - it’s a problem with Real Player 9. Update to v10 at http://www.real.com.
Also - even if Real Player is telling you it’s the latest version - it’s lying.
June 17th, 2005 at 7:58 pm Quote
THE HAWKMAN IS CORRECT!!! nice one! i’m very psyched this works. i was using real one player because i thought real player 10 wasn’t free. real player 10 is free and it fixes the graying out of buttons on this and a number of other widgets. thank you much.
peace
June 17th, 2005 at 8:09 pm Quote
here’s one for you. does anyone know how to make BBC Radio (and all other widgets for that matter) play through http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/ ? if you try to select the widget directly, real player or safari it doesn’t work, and it says “hijacking error” if you try to select the dashboard app. i suspect the error lies with airfoil, but i thought i’d throw it out to the bright minds on this forum.
peace
June 17th, 2005 at 8:19 pm Quote
right so i found the answer to my own question. link below for those interested:
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/forum/ubb/Forum7/HTML/000104.html
peace
June 21st, 2005 at 8:41 pm Quote
Not working here either.
Widget v1.5
RealPlayer v10.0.0 (331)
Mac OS 10.4.1 (on a Power Mac G5 dual 2.0)
Stations play fine directly through RealPlayer. Play button on widget is grayed out.
June 21st, 2005 at 8:45 pm Quote
In addition to the above, Safari confirms:
RealPlayer Plugin
RealMedia Player — from file “RealPlayer Pluginâ€.
MIME Type: audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin
Description: RealPlayer Plugin
Extensions: rm
June 22nd, 2005 at 12:29 am Quote
V1.5 working fine here. Great to see the requested volume buttons on the front - thank you! This is a fantastic widget and somehow keeps getting better.
June 23rd, 2005 at 10:10 am Quote
I love your new BBC widget - congratulations!
However I’ve noticed the the sonic quality of it isn’t as good as actually going to the BBC website and listening there.
For example, turn on Radio 4 on your player and compare with the BBC Radio4 player at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4.shtml.
You’ll notice that playing directly from the BBC site sounds ’smoother’ and less ‘digitised’.
Hoping that you can fix this - it’s a little too grainy for me right now.
June 23rd, 2005 at 10:47 am Quote
The sweetest thing, to make this widget *really* rock, would be an integrated program guide. Gotta know when the rugby’s gonna be broadcast, right?
June 23rd, 2005 at 4:39 pm Quote
Andy - sorry your comment took a while to appear, it got sent to the mod queue, probably because of the long link.
It’s the same audio stream, and it’s the same plugin playing it. If the sound isn’t as good, it’s because the widget is struggling to get the information quickly enough, either through lack of processor resources or lack of bandwidth - and I can’t force OS X to give the widget more of either of those. I hesitate to suggest that you might be imagining it, but I haven’t had any major problems along these lines
July 1st, 2005 at 1:36 am Quote
Your BBC Radio widget is the best. It works perfectly and I get my UK news fix whenever I want.
Thank you!
July 11th, 2005 at 2:38 am Quote
Thank you so much for this widget! Now I finally feel like I’m connected to the rest of the world
July 11th, 2005 at 7:18 pm Quote
How about a status message showing what programme is on now and next?
The information is available at the various radio station homepages (http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/ etc.)
Alternatively, you clicking on the station logo could just launch that corresponding station webpage.
Otherwise, brilliant widget!
–
dp
July 12th, 2005 at 7:23 pm Quote
The links I considered - but decided it would get very annoying when Safari opened every time you wanted to move the widget
Now & Next isn’t actually available for all stations, and it opens a whole can of worms - where would it go on the widget? how often would it check for updated information? - as well as being considerably more difficult to implement than writing the entire widget has been already. However, it’s a distant possibility, as it’s quite frequently requested. Cheers!
July 12th, 2005 at 11:53 pm Quote
Hi, first time Apple User and I’m completely stuck. I’ve downloaded the widget, but what do I do now? If I drag it to the dock, it just shows as a folder. I’ve downloaded some Widget Management sofware, Widget Manager and Widget Pref. Pane. and whilst it says it has installed, it doesn’t show up. Any help would be good. I’ve got internet access, real player, sound comes out the speaker, but I don’t know what to do next!!
July 14th, 2005 at 10:27 am Quote
Mikeymoo: Have you got Tiger (Mac OS 10.4)? It doesn’t sound like it, if the widget is showing up as a folder. I’m afraid you need 10.4 to use Dashboard widgets. To check if you’ve got it or not, go to “About This Mac” in the Apple menu (far left).
July 16th, 2005 at 1:28 am Quote
love the idea of the widget, but the sound quality does differ from that of the actual bbc web site streams. Dont know why, but it does have much lower quality, as someone said, naff digitized sound. Need to sort that out and will be perfect. Good work rab.
July 18th, 2005 at 12:18 pm Quote
Cannot for love nor money get 1.5 of the widget to play any audio - real player 10 is installed and works fine from the bbc radio player - is there anything else I need to do for the plugin to work ok ?
July 18th, 2005 at 7:39 pm Quote
Rab: really not noticing it here, and it’s not something I can do anything about AFAIK. Sounds like Dashboard’s not giving it enough resources on your machine, for whatever reason.
AndyH: have you tried everything on this thread? I know “I can’t get audio” sounds like a good description of the problem, but I’d like to make this clear to the dozens of people who email me saying that - it doesn’t help me one jot.
What problems are you experiencing Andy? Greyed-out buttons? Lego bricks? Help me to help you. 
July 19th, 2005 at 1:05 pm Quote
Can you please add radio Scotland?
July 19th, 2005 at 7:16 pm Quote
Ok, ok, I’ve had enough requests for it.
It’ll be in the next release - which, incidentally, will require Mac OS X 10.4.2 or better.
July 21st, 2005 at 10:38 pm Quote
Reading your comment about “lego bricks” (July 18th); I have them….plus no sound.
I am running RealPlayer 10, on a powerbook G4 with OS 10.4.2
Been through the list of 5, and everything else looks okay (I can play BBC radio from the BBC website).
July 21st, 2005 at 10:44 pm Quote
All is well! Downloading the widget from this website (version 1.5?) worked perfectly. The original download was from the apple website (can’t remember what version this was).
Hope this helps anyone else with similar problems
July 21st, 2005 at 10:53 pm Quote
Hi Hawkman,
I was having the same problem with playback that PJ mentioned on 15th June above. PJ wrote:
“the first time i drag the widget from the dock it works fine. if i flip it over and change stations i get nothing. i kill the widget - re-drag it - and all is well… with the last selected station…”
I tried what PJ suggested & now the widget’s working fine, but it also continues to work fine after changing stations too. The only thing I haven’t tried yet is to see if it works fine after a re-start…
Above you (Hawkman) mentioned that the fix is to get RealPlayer 10 rather than 9… :
To clarify, I had Realplayer 10 already installed, & never 9. The widget’s buttons seemed to work fine (i.e. alternate between play & pause) on the widget - I just wasn’t hearing any audio. Killing the widget & then adding it back to the screen is the only thing I’ve done (I didn’t bother deleting pref’s etc) & it’s worked fine since. FYI: I’m running OS X.4.2 on a 1.67gHz Powerbook.
Other than this minor problem, the widget’s fabulous! Thanks!
Jason
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:41 am Quote
Dan: Don’t know why the download didn’t work for you the first time - the Apple site points to the same file.
The lego bricks thing means a missing plugin, so for some reason I guess the widget couldn’t see it the first time. Weird.
Jason: Strange problem there. Possibly the widget isn’t setting its preferences properly on first run, but I know that it certainly was doing until recently… If anyone else is having similar problems, it is well worth installing RealPlayer 10, even if you already have it - some OS upgrades can screw about with Safari plugins, apparently. (re)installing RP solves 90% of the problems you could have with this widget. For the record, PJ has the classic symptoms of an outdated version of RP.
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:47 pm Quote
I also had initial problems in getting the widget to run.
I’m fairly sure the snag was seeing the Real Player plug-in in Safari. I could see it there; it just wasn’t being recogized.
The answer was pretty simple: restart the machine and then it worked immediately - I am currently listening to Lynne Featherstone on Any Questions on Radio 4 and its working fine …
August 5th, 2005 at 10:33 pm Quote
Your widget is great. I didn’t realise how much I liked to listen to radio while I work.
But I have one request.
Is it possible to add BBC Radio Scotland to your list of stations?
I’m a big fan of Mr Anderson’s fine tunes.
September 25th, 2005 at 10:29 am Quote
I am in Shanghai and it is not working here. Any way to fix it?
October 6th, 2005 at 2:23 pm Quote
Great widget, where is Ulster by the way?
Why not put BBC London radio on there too?
October 6th, 2005 at 10:10 pm Quote
Northern Ireland! The next release has complete local radio listings (and it took a bloody long time) - 1.7 will go live once I’ve added in an auto-updater.
October 23rd, 2005 at 9:37 pm Quote
Harkman, great little widget - thanks for local radio including Ulster - any chance of adding Radio Foyle. Thanks for your hard work
November 14th, 2005 at 8:56 pm Quote
First off - great widget. Couple of things though.
1) the people who say it just complains all of the time about no internet connection - I had that and finally realised that it was due to proxies being configured incorrectly. Once I loaded the network settings in system prferences and sorted out the settings it worked fine. I’d not noticed that it was broken as I use firefox most of the time and this has it’s own settings.
2) listening to radio5 this afternoon and noticed it seems much lower quality than the bbc widget or if I use the bbc player. I assume this is due to it connecting to a lower quality feed? Is it possible to point it at the higher bandwidth stream (don’t know if this is true of the other stations - I only tried fivelive :-))
cheers
November 14th, 2005 at 9:03 pm Quote
Darren,
1) Good catch, I assume Dashboard uses the system proxies.
2) It uses the same stream, sure it’s not in your head?
November 16th, 2005 at 5:00 am Quote
How do you get the real player browser plug in.?
November 16th, 2005 at 7:05 am Quote
Just dropped in to say thanks and noticed the new download.
Two or three clicks and it was up and running.
It’s nice to see that local UK radio plays bad music too.
To keep an idea of what is on, I bookmarked the skedule - . Need to remember the times are UK and not GMT (as is the case in shortwave).
Thanks for the listening tips. I am sure my favorite classics on BBC7 are not among those you were speaking of.
Thanks again!
Cheers!
November 16th, 2005 at 10:19 am Quote
1) Good catch, I assume Dashboard uses the system proxies.
Appears so. Works fine since I sorted that.
2) It uses the same stream, sure it’s not in your head?
Nope. It did sound worse. But I’ve played a bit more and it seems to be the feed. It’s almost as if it downgrades if the server is too busy. Anyway, not a problem with your widget - I get the same effect with the bbc one at times.
Cheers. Great little widget!
November 16th, 2005 at 12:29 pm Quote
Rob - from Real.com
Darren - yeah, the live streams can be highly suspicious at times… and of course, the more popular the show is, the worse the audio quality!
Lee - cheers. Might be sensible to add a link to the schedule from the back of the widget I guess
November 25th, 2005 at 9:07 am Quote
Fantastic to hear some local news from the UK while I am living down here in New Zealand. Blows my mind to hear local traffic reports on areas I once lived in 15 years ago.
December 8th, 2005 at 2:39 pm Quote
This is one of the Perfect widgets that everyone has to have - thankyou… Sadly, I can’t seem to get it to work on my machine - if anyone has any suggestions? Here’s my situation summarised handily in checklist form:
1. Speakers are on
2. Internet connection is active
3. Standard 10.4.3 OS X firewall is on
4. Listening via bbc.co.uk works fine
5. Latest version of widget + Realplayer
6. Launching the widget shows the play button briefly, before it turns into a pause button and is highlighted blue - this would suggest that it’s playing a stream
7. Changing stations and re-launching widget has no effect
8. + and - volume buttons don’t respond when pressed; the mute button does, however
I have been looking for the widget all my life - so near yet so far…
December 8th, 2005 at 2:48 pm Quote
Ah. Literally a minute after I posted my comment, I get a dialog from the widget saying the connection was lost and prompts me to click OK. Doing so causes it to quit unexpectedly, with OS X bringing up a dialog asking would I like to relaunch the widget or send a report to Apple. On relaunching the widget (each and every time), the play button appears greyed out, whereas the mute button is responsive and the + - volume controls *look* responsive but aren’t (ie they’re the same shade of grey as the mute button, but if you click on them, they don’t press down).
If you think that’d be of any help, I can send you a copy of the report… Arsebiscuits.
December 28th, 2005 at 1:11 am Quote
It’s a great widget, thanks. A couple of suggestion:
1) Make the logos link to the relevant web page.
2) Consider removing the volume controls, which are redundant given that OSX has a great menubar volume controller.
3) Make it a bit bigger, or at least the play/pause button.
4) Most importantly…make “play” the default when the widget loads, so the BBC loads on startup - or, is there some way I can set this up myself?
Thanks! Josef
December 28th, 2005 at 1:14 am Quote
One more thing…I find that the Realplayer streams are dropped a lot…so I have to constantly (once per hour, or so) hit “play” on the widget to reload it. Do others have this problem? Is it widget-related? Real-related? Or just a busy internet?
December 29th, 2005 at 7:14 pm Quote
Great job! One small request - Radio 4 LW? (For the cricket fans…)
December 30th, 2005 at 9:11 am Quote
I have your widget working on my laptop and iMac, but I can’t get it to load Real Player on my Mac Mini.
Also for the Cricket fans, the BBC don’t have the online rights to broadcast the cricket I think. If they do, it’s usually on BBC Sports Extra
December 31st, 2005 at 12:36 pm Quote
Josef - (1) Thought about it, decided that the number of accidental clicks would be too annoyingly high. (2) The volume controls are actually linked to Real Player plugin’s volume; useful for adjusting volume relative to other apps, or turning up the volume if you accidentally turned it down in Safari or something. (3) Maaaaybe, but it’s really supposed to be a minimal widget. (4) Not a bad idea.
Aidan - Gordon’s right on both counts about the cricket; I’m a fan myself, so BBC4LW would have been on there if it were necessary!
Gordon - My best suggestion is to reinstall Real Player. Apparently some OS upgrades can mess with Safari plugins.
January 2nd, 2006 at 12:24 am Quote
Hi Hawkman. OK, of my four suggestions the last one is certainly the most desired (make the widget play on startup). I guess I can’t set that up using Automator, as I can’t “see” Dashboard or any of the widgets in Automator… Would be really useful, as in:
1) Set computer to turn on at 6am.
2) Be woken up by BBC automatically… (I’m in Canada)
Is the source of the widget available to be tinkered with, and relatively easy to do for a novice tinkerer? Failing that, could you set it as an option?
Thanks! Josef
January 2nd, 2006 at 2:30 am Quote
It’s dead easy Josef. Widgets are actually just special packages - control-click and choose “show package contents” to reveal its composite files.
Open up the “BBC Radio.js” file in a text editor like SubEthaEdit. Do a find & replace, changing autostart=”false” to autostart=”true” - there are 4, although the two on line 932 are the only ones you should actually need to change. Save, and restart the widget. That should work.
January 4th, 2006 at 7:34 am Quote
Thanks Hawkman, I’ll try that!
January 14th, 2006 at 5:21 pm Quote
Right. So I see there’s no chance of you helping *me* out then, after how many weeks.
January 14th, 2006 at 5:58 pm Quote
If I had an answer, Preacherman, I’d have given it to you. Sorry, but I don’t know what’s wrong.
January 16th, 2006 at 9:29 am Quote
One of the things that may, or may not have helped me was launching realplayer 10 and choosing ‘check for updates’ in the realplayer (top left) menu. There were 3 or 4 security updates which I installed and it worked after that. Prior to that I was getting a cannot connect message.
Thanks very much for making this.
March 1st, 2006 at 3:00 pm Quote
The addition of regional stations really makes this my most used widget ever, it’s great.
Could you perhaps add ‘BBC Radio4 LongWave’ in the next version, so I can use your widget to listen to the Cricket?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/realplayer/media/lwg2.ram
Thanks
March 1st, 2006 at 4:54 pm Quote
Can someone please help me! Ive tried both this widget and the BBC website and all to no avail - from the Beeb (via Safari) i get the following message:
The page “BBC Radio Player†has content of MIME type “application/x-mplayer2″. Because you dont have a plug-in installed for this MIME type, this content cant be displayed.
Where i would expect the controls in the widget and the bbc player, instead i get these light blue lego icons with question marks on them.
I have the latest OSX, Safari (i got a intel imac last week) and downloaded the latest player which i have reset and unistalled and reinstalled - but all the same.
Where do i get this missing plugin from / how do i install it??!
Apologies but this is drving me mad!
PS
I can listen to the beeb radio if i select the standalone mode (whcih places a ram file on my desktop) but not directly via the bbc radio player controls or the widget.
All help appreciated
March 6th, 2006 at 5:21 am Quote
Hi Hawkman. I modified the widget as you suggested (allowing it to autostart) and that works fine. Actually, the widget is SUPERB, I love it. But…when I set Dashboard to start at startup I get a message from the widget that there’s no internet connection. I think this is because Dashboard starts too soon, before the internet connection is set up. I’ve tried Dashboard Startup and Dashboard Kickstart, but they suffer from a different problem (they start and quit the Dashboard too quickly for the widget to connect to the internet, so the widget is just left waiting and only connects to the BBC if I manually start the Dashboard). So, it seems that I need to find a workaround to start the Dashboard on startup, keep it open long enough (60 seconds or so) to connect to the BBC, then disappear. Any ideas? Thanks, Josef
March 7th, 2006 at 1:00 am Quote
Great Widget. Works a treat on my G3IMac. But won’t run on my new Intel IMac, running OS X 10.4.5. Real Player 10.0.0 is loaded. No controls visible… just pair of blue icons. What am I doing wrong ? Internet is fine, same widget works fine on G3.
March 7th, 2006 at 1:02 am Quote
Real Player is not yet a universal binary, and Real don’t exactly seem to be making speedy progress.
March 7th, 2006 at 2:07 am Quote
So is the fault with Real Player ?
March 7th, 2006 at 2:08 am Quote
Any work round ?
March 7th, 2006 at 2:14 am Quote
Unfortunately not. Until Real Player is a universal binary, the plugin (needed for audio) can’t be run within an Intel-native application (such as Dashboard).
January 8th, 2007 at 9:53 am Quote
If you’re having trouble installing this widget on a case-sensitive filesystem use Terminal to cd into the widget directory and issue the command:
mv default.png Default.png
After which it should install fine.
January 20th, 2007 at 7:03 pm Quote
i have exact same problem as STEVE ^
i am getting very frustrated i have no idea what to do…
if anybody has any solutions it would be much appreciated, thanks!
January 22nd, 2007 at 10:53 am Quote
JC - You’re just missing RealPlayer plugin - get the download from Real.com. And if you have lego bricks showing - you don’t have the latest version of the widget (which, incidentally, ought to show you a message about this anyway).
Andy
March 29th, 2007 at 8:06 pm Quote
After several months of using this excellent widget, I am having a problem with BBC 7. Everything *looks* fine, but no sound comes out (and it’s not the volume control’s fault). As far as I can see *all*
the other channels work fine. I thought it might be a problem with the url that the widget is contacting, but
if I look at the plist file, with
defaults read widget-com.phantomgorilla.widget.bbcradio
I see the following:
{
ID = 18112;
Volume = 57;
band = “”;
lastupdatecheck = 1175194330730;
latestversion = “2.2″;
logo = “images/bbc7.gif”;
selection = 9;
url = “http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/realplayer/dsatg2.rpm”;
}
and that seems to be the correct url, because if I open it in real player (directly, or via Safari) it works.
I have realplayer Version 10.1.0 (412).
Any help or advice greatly appreciated.
May 9th, 2007 at 5:40 am Quote
I love this widget, but I’m struggling to get it to work properly. I solved one problem - no sound despite having RealPlayer 10 installed and, yes, the volume is working on the computer. For those of you who have “no sound” issues and are using a newer iMac, I found the following obscure note on the RealPlayer help site:
“Note: For users of Macintosh computers purchased after September 2004 (such as iMac G5s, Mac minis, and PowerBook laptops), a problem in Mac OS X on some recent Macintosh computer hardware can cause loss of sound in RealPlayer and certain other applications. Launching Apple’s GarageBand software once will resolve the problem.”
The second issue is that the feed is dropped after almost exactly one minute of playing, and I have to press the play button again. This is getting annoying very quickly. Is this a RealPlayer issue? Any help would be appreciated!
June 18th, 2007 at 9:07 pm Quote
Thank you bunches! I absolutely couldn’t find a solution for the loss of sound upon moving to RealPlayer 10.1.0, and, honestly, on reading that I thought, “yeah, sure.” But, in fact, it fixed the problem, exactly as advertised. I launched Garageband. Played an old project (don’t know if that’s necessary). Quit Garageband. And now RealPlayer 10.1.0 works fine.
I’ve now found the advice in other places, but not on real.com–not even knowing to google for ["loss of sound" garageband]. So, again, thanks!
July 27th, 2007 at 11:47 am Quote
I’m having some issues with the widget, unfortunately. When I try to start playback, I get the spinning gears for about half a second and then nothing. Play button returns to stopped state, but hitting it just repeats the process…
When I hit the button a file briefly appears in the Preferences folder with the name cf#XXXXX where XXXXX is a random set of alphanumeric characters. At the same time in the Console i get the following reports:
(event handler):Undefined value
2007-07-27 11:37:00.274 DashboardClient[409] (com.phantomgorilla.widget.bbcradio) file:///Users/username/Library/Widgets/BBC%20Radio.wdgt/schedule.js: Undefined value (line: 30)
(event handler):Undefined value
(event handler):Undefined value
2007-07-27 11:37:00.315 DashboardClient[418] (com.phantomgorilla.widget.bbcradio) file:///Users/username/Library/Widgets/BBC%20Radio.wdgt/schedule.js: Undefined value (line: 30)
(event handler):Undefined value
(event handler):Undefined value
2007-07-27 11:37:00.904 DashboardClient[419] (com.phantomgorilla.widget.bbcradio) file:///Users/username/Library/Widgets/BBC%20Radio.wdgt/schedule.js: Undefined value (line: 30)
(event handler):Undefined value
I have checked that Real media plays correctly in Safari. I have Real 10. Safari 2.0.4 and Mac OS X 10.4.10. Running on a 1.6GHz G5 with 2GB RAM.
As it is a company-based system, I don’t have Garageband, but as RealPlayer and the web-based player work OK, I don’t think this would help.
Any help anyone can offer to enable me to resume use of this excellent widget would be greatly appreciated.
September 30th, 2007 at 5:35 pm Quote
Just installed this widget (along with RealPlayer) and it took me forever to figure out why no sound: I had my firewall on. To fix:
1. In RealPlayer, Preferences -> Transport, click on the Use specific UDP Ports. I used the default (7070 and 7071)
2. In System Preferences -> Sharing -> Firewall, click on “New…” and for Port Name, select “Other”, leave TCP port number(s) blank, and in UDP Port number(s) enter “7070, 7071″.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:02 pm Quote
Love the widget. Used it every day… until today, now it doesn’t work. Spinning grey circle but no connection. Real Player works when connected to the BBC website. Please help, would love to get it working again…
Thanks lots,
Jamie
December 11th, 2007 at 5:38 pm Quote
Argh. Sorry for wasting your time. Re-downloaded Real and restarted. Sorry - and thank you!
December 13th, 2007 at 3:09 pm Quote
Love the widget, too. Since upgrading to Leopard, I’ve had some issues, like the widget playing only when dashboard is on the screen (once I hit f12 to hide the dashboard, the stream plays for a few seconds and then quits, until I bring dashboard back up. Then everything works fine, again). Thanks, again!
Dave
January 5th, 2008 at 10:48 am Quote
Hi, also love the widget, I have been using it on Tiger fine. But like Dave, since upgrading to Leopard I can’t seem to get it to work unless the dashboard is open.
Do you have any advice?
January 11th, 2008 at 8:55 pm Quote
Huh? Strange, I get it to play, but as soon as I move from Dashboard to Desktop, the audio stops… I go back to Dashboard, and the sound continues… any ideas?
January 16th, 2008 at 3:38 am Quote
Works great for about a minute than stops. G5 Dual 2.0 10.4.11 Love to hear the BBC in Texas!
February 8th, 2008 at 4:41 am Quote
seems not to work in Leopard, the stream stops as soon as you leave dashboard
March 1st, 2008 at 11:41 am Quote
yes i have the same problem. Whenever you come off dashboard the audio stops and when you go back on to dashboard it starts again. any ideas on how to fix this because it means i cant use my computer while the radio is on. i am running os 10.5.2.
thank you
March 27th, 2008 at 2:48 pm