October 19th, 2006 by Scott McDaniel

New Apple Dashboard Widget for SurveyGizmo

Do you run surveys? Do you have a Mac? Then monitoring and managing your surveys is just one keystroke away, thanks to our brand new Apple dashboard widget, developed in partnership with wdgty.

For those of you who unfamiliar with the term, a widget is a mini-application that runs on the Apple OS X Dashboard. You can toggle to your dashboard by pressing the F12 key. Try it! Your Mac comes with a few basic widgets that tell the time, stocks and local weather. Plus, developers around the world are creating some wonderful tools that have integrated widgets — like SurveyGizmo!

About Our Survey Widget

Our groovy little widget is great for keeping an eye on your surveys without keeping a pesky browser window open. We show your basic stats right on the widget, so you can watch the numbers grow as people fill out your survey. In Progress surveys turn into Completed, Abandoned, or Partially Completed. You also have handy links to Create a New Survey or Edit, Reporting, and Preview an existing one.

Apple Dashboard Survey Widget

How to hook your widget up

The only requirement is a Mac with OS X 10.4 (Tiger). (PC users stay tuned for our Yahoo Konfabulator Widget for the PC)


STEP 1

You need to first go to your account screen and click to enable your user API Key. If you don’t have an account, you can create a free account (which has everything a casual surveyor needs — and it’s yours forever).

API user key screen

STEP 2
Download the widget from our widget page or from the Apple site. Save the zip file to your desktop, then double-click the zip file to decompress it. You’ll see the widget appear next to or under the zip. Just double-click the widget itself to place the widget on your dashboard.

STEP 3
Now you’ll need your API key (that thing you took from your account page). Copy and paste your key into the widget configuration screen. (You get the config screen by clicking the “i” on the bottom right hand corner of the widget).Apple Widget Setup Screenshot

You’re Ready to Rock ‘n Roll!

Yep, that’s all there is to it. Start cranking out those surveys, polls and quizes. If you make a really amazing survey or template (or get stuck trying to do something amazing), let us know! We are dying to see what creative things the Mac community can come up with! Our PC friends seem to like running consumer research surveys, but you can so so much more with SurveyGizmo. Go show ‘em how it’s done!

Special Thanks

Our friends over at wdgty, Stuart and Stephan, did a great job with the widget and we wholeheartedly recommend them. If you are looking for a widget to go with your own web business, try them out. Thanks, guys!

Permanent link to the SurveyGizmo Widget:

SurveyGizmo Widget Page

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Windows PC Users

Sadly, the PC platform doesn’t have native support for widgets, but the free Yahoo Konfabulator is similar. Let us know if you’d like to see a Konfabulator widget.

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Scott McDaniel
Scott McDaniel is the co-founder, CEO and lead designer at SurveyGizmo. He has been passionate about entrepreneurism and designing friendly, usable web applications for over 10 years at companies such as MarketingSherpa, LexisNexis, MessageMedia, and DoubleClick.

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