I’m addicted to reading my horoscope everyday. For real. Call me gullible or call me cool but it’s something I’ve grown up doing and I’m too lazy to bother stop doing so now. But why do I have to get my astrological fix by running an OS X dashboard widget in Ubuntu?
Options in Ubuntu
Sadly there is no widget, screenlet or plasmoid available for Linux that provides me with my daily horoscope with as much ease, elegance or, dare we say, user friendliness as the dashboard widget I so covet. As such coping with the 90% spike in CPU the OS X widget costs seem worth it – if only to find out whether the day holds a visit from an old acquaintance or whether the Moon moving into Cancer will result in a slightly emotionally-frenetic day ;)
Compare the above ‘widget’ to the official Horoscope screenlet: –
I n comparison it looks outdated, simplistic and uglier than a retrograde Mercury through Taurus. Not to mention it lacks many features i’ve come to find indispensable; hey, if it’s going to be sat on my desktop most of the day it can at least do a bit more than what it does, right?
My dream ‘widget’
I mocked up my ‘dream’ horoscope application a few months back.
Taking cues from Gloobus’ HUD style interface and the widget I so dearly love it looks a slick bit of kit.
It would use Astrology.com’s RSS feeds to provide a more ‘advanced’ set of forecasting features: daily, weekly, monthly and other forecasts, all available with ‘previous/yesterday/last month’, ‘present/today/this month’, and ‘future/tomorrow/next month’ switching.
If anyone thinks they could turn this pixel-based desire into a fully-working python reality then please get in touch or join the Launchpad group @ launchpad.net/desktopology.
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