Battery Hen Widget

Question

Hi.
I don't know whether anyone is interested, but the battery hen widget is a cool representation of the charge left in your laptop (represented by a line of eggs). I like my widgets to have a bit of humor attached to them, so i wanted to use this one.
Anyway the widget doesn't work on a macbook because the developer wrote it specifically for Powerbooks and iBooks.
I just got it to work on my Macbook, by editing the widget.
If you find the widget in your /user/library/widgets folder, and then show package contents(right click on the widget and select it from the contextual menu), and open up the BatteryHen.html file in a text editor (I use Smultron because its free and does everything I need it to)
http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
Ok, now search through the file and find the line that reads:
batteryHenInterval=setInterval("getBatteryHen()",1000);
you'll notice that its inside a while loop, which runs some method which I assume determines whether or not the laptop is the correct model for the widget to work (in this case it only returns true for powerbooks and ibooks). if this while loop returns false then it displays an image over the top of the widget saying "This widget only works for powerbooks and ibooks" or somethign like that. Anyway.
replace this:
loadPrefs();
valid=SysStatPlugin.getValidSystem();
if(valid=="true"){
batteryHenInterval=setInterval("getBatteryHen()",1000);
} else {
document.getElementById("front").innerHTML+="";
With just this:
batteryHenInterval=setInterval("getBatteryHen()",1000);
And then save the html file and close down all your finders etc. Then if the widget is already running, close it down, and restart it.
Now your BatteryHen will work.
Hurrah.
By the way I'm not sure if i'm allowed to post like this for people to alter widgets and whatnot but I figure since it actually lets people use the widget, then it cant do any harm.

Answer 1

Rael12345678 wrote:
Maybe I'm in the wrong place for this, but I don't know where else to go to ask.
Is there a widget for your battery readout? Something that gives you everything: perentage, time remaining, icon, etc.? It seems like there're widgets for everything else, so not finding one for this seems odd.
iStat Pro will give you a lot of information about your MBP.