Pingdom Home

US + international: +1-212-796-6890

SE + international: +46-21-480-0920

Business hours 3 am-11:30 am EST (Mon-Fri).

Royal Pingdom

Apple Store status widget for Mac OS X

A month ago we released an Apple Store status banner that was powered by Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service. Anyone could put it on their website to show the US Apple Store status (up or down) in real time. The reason this is interesting is of course because Apple usually updates or releases new products in connection with taking down the Apple Store.

It became a success and we got a lot of really positive feedback. One thing that people kept asking for was a widget for their Mac OS X desktops, so they could have the status icon always available in the Dashboard.

So here it is, by popular demand: An Apple Store status widget for Mac OS X (10.4 and later):

Download widget

Just add it to your Dashboard and it will work automatically (when the Dashboard is activated). No more manual checking!

Apple Store Status widget screenshots

Above: The different status icons for the widget. The “loading error” is only shown if your computer cannot connect and get the status from Pingdom.

How it works

Pingdom handles the actual monitoring of the US Apple Store website. The widget will connect to Pingdom and update its status once per minute. For details on how the monitoring is done on Pingdom’s end, check out the post about the Apple Store status banner.

This means that no matter how many people add this widget to their desktops, Apple will not get bombarded with tests since the only tests are those performed once per minute by Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service.

Let us know what you think

We hope you like this widget. It’s actually the first one we’ve made.

Let us know what you think in the comments. :)

Want to test your site every minute?








You will get an email with your login information.

16 Comments

Excellent! :) I will definitely try this out. It will make Tuesdays a little extra interesting.

Good God! Are people so obsessed that they have to know every minute what new products of Apples are up, what’s in stock, etc. etc.?

I’m not a Mac basher since I’ve only used Macs from 1989 onwards, and before that was an Apple ][e so it’s been Apple since day one for me. Still….seems a little more than obsessive!

Excellent, now I can ditch my weblcip version. The only improvement I can see is if I clicked on it that I could get a summary of down times. Other than that, I love it!

I would love to see a web based version of this…to put on a blog or website or whatnot. Maybe even port it to an iGoogle gadget. That would rock.

Ryaninc: Read the first sentence again and click the link. :)

They already have a banner: http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=251

It would be great if an audible “ping” could somehow alert us. Great idea specially for Tuesdays now and then. Thanks

Is there a OS X widget that allows you to monitor your pingdom sites?

Leave a Reply

Comments are moderated and not published in real time. All comments that are not related to the post will be removed.


15 fantastic firsts on the Internet

First!

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

Read more

Facebook, social media juggernaut (infographic)

FacebookFacebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

Read more

New from Pingdom: Shareable uptime banners with graphs

Pingdom logoSometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

Read more

Why the iPad’s lack of multitasking is a GOOD thing

Apple iPad

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

Read more

The 20 richest Americans in tech

Richest in ITThe tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

Read more