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Mac Oil Price Widget

Because there doesn’t seem to be a good, simple way to track oil prices on the Mac dashboard anymore since the previous widget I used quit working, I whipped up a quick little widget that allows me to monitor the price of Crude Oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It uses Bloomberg Energy as it’s information source and updates each time you show the dashboard.

History:

  • Version 2.4 was released on November 16th, 2012. It addressed a few more issues arising from the data change, and added the ability to click the price and see a full report on the energy market.
  • Version 2.3 was released on November 2nd, 2012. It addressed a change in data format that was resulting in bad data being displayed.
  • Version 2.2 was released on February 8th, 2012. It addressed a small bug that resulted in the negative symbol continuing to be displayed when the price was down (not necessary because the widget says Up or Down).
  • Version 2.1 was released on February 1st, 2012. It addressed some bugs in 2.0 that would cause inaccurate data to be show as far as whether prices were up or down, and by what percentage.
  • Version 2.0 was released on January 25th, 2012. It was completely rewritten – like, I didn’t even look at the old code – and uses Bloomberg Energy as it’s information source. The display was also simplified – I really didn’t care about the chart in the old version, so the new version prominently displays the price and how much it’s changed.
  • Version 1.0 was released on June 25th, 2011. It used Yahoo finance as the backend and stopped functioning shortly thereafter.

Download Here!

  • ZONIAN

    Thanks, I was looking for something just like this. Any chance you might create an option to make it smaller,
    I use about 50 active widgets, real estate is at a premium
    with them, some dragged over onto my desktop. My cpu
    experience without them would be 5% of what it is with
    them. My desktop is covered in about 240 bookmarks,
    folders and postage stamps, I don’t want my “library”
    filled away out of sight, I want to see what’s on the shelves as I take a look. One doesn’t put their real
    books in boxes and hide them away. If you would
    make this oil price widget smaller I’d find a spot for
    it on my desktop instead of dashboard, a real honor, ha !

  • http://www.robpeck.com Rob Peck

    Thanks for the suggestion, but I think I’m going to leave it at it’s current size. I like for it to be big so that I can spot it / read it without too much trouble.

    Yours is what we would call an edge case; most people don’t have 50 widgets active at any given time. I designed it to be close in size to many of the common widgets (weather, stocks, calculator, etc). So I’m designing for the largest number of users.

  • Tyler Miller

    Looking to get the price into my website, but I only want the current price as text to embed over an image. Can you creat this or can you tell me how you were abel to feed in from bloomberg? Something specifric you have to do, or just create javascrip that pulls it?

  • http://www.robpeck.com Rob Peck

    Tyler,

    I wrote some Javascript that fetches the Bloomberg Energy page and reads out the appropriate line. What you are talking about is significantly more complex.

  • Tom

    Rob–
    Just wanted to say thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for. Simple, neat and efficient.
    Thanks again!
    Tom

  • billydude

    Rob,

    Simple and effective – excellent, thanks.

    Bill