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):

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

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.

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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