If you have an obsessive-compulsive need to keep an eye on the Apple Store, have it bookmarked in Safari and hit refresh every twenty seconds, consider yourself lucky because we bear great news for you today. Having noticed Apple’s weekly trend of taking the store down every Tuesday, Pingdom has come up with a badge that displays the status of the Apple Store at any given time.
All you have to do is copy the HTML code they’ve helpfully provided and paste it on your website anywhere you want (friendly advice: posting it on all four corners of every single page on your site is probably not a good idea). It only gets updated every minute, so it might not be able to beat some of the more hardcore humanoid Apple Store trackers among us (yes, they exist), but for most people it’s good enough.
Though I’m not quite sure whether I would want to put that on my own personal website, I did find a very suitable place for it. Visit this page using Safari on Leopard and make a webclip out of the graphic there. Lo, you have a constantly updated Apple Store status indicator (similar to the one pictured above) just a keystroke away. If only the design had been a tad spiffier!
Now that we’ve seen this put into practice, it makes me wonder what took them so long. Why don’t we have a host of widgets, applications, menu extras and plugins already that essentially do the same thing? I’m guessing that now that the idea has been seeded, we’ll see someone come up with a better designed Dashboard widget for this soon enough.
In the meanwhile, kudos to Pingdom for getting there first. Hopefully, we’ll know whether it works as advertised in a couple of days from now.
[Via TUAW]
beyond pathetic.