doombot » Find/Make This For Me: Xbox Friends Widget

Sometimes, I want to play Xbox games with my friends, but I don’t feel like calling them to tell them they should play with me. I would rather check to see who’s already playing games, and then see if I can join them. The problem with this is that checking who’s online requires turning on my Xbox—and then, once it’s on, even if nobody’s around, well heck, it’s on so I might as well play a game, right? Or fifteen. Or until I reach the next skill level in Halo 3. Etc.

I decided this would be much easier if I had a buddy list on my PC that showed which of my Xbox Live friends are logged in and what they’re playing, much as you can check from the Xbox Dashboard. Seeing as how Adium/iChat/Xbox Live synchronization seems not so near on the horizon, though, and that I don’t run Windows Active Desktop to take advantage of stuff that’s already been made, I wondered if there might just be a Mac Dashboard widget that would do this for me.

A cursory search for such a Dashboard Widget yielded this, but it doesn’t quite fit the bill—each friend you enter (manually) is listed HUGE, with full gamer icon, regardless of whether the friend is on or offline. How hard could it be, though, to have a widget that accepts a username and password (like the GMail checking widget, though for Xbox Live’s website), and that only lists the friends that are currently online?

Well, pretty hard for me, maybe, having given up my life as a coder. But if you are looking for a fun Xbox/Mac project, or if this already exists and your mastery of Google is superior to mine, I wholeheartedly encourage you to pursue this—not just for me, but for the good of mankind.

10 Comments so far

Does this work?

http://brh.numbera.com/software/xblist/

Don’t mind me. I thought you used a Mac but when I read your post I somehow developed the sense that you were looking for something for Windows.

In an effort to redeem myself (and to post three consecutive times):

http://www.pure-mac.com/downloads/xboxlivefriendsdl.html

and

http://99lives.org/2007/02/11/xbox-live-mac-maclive/

The latter appears to do Growl notifications.

I am still impressed and grateful that you actually found this. It sounds pretty awesome.

This is one of maybe two or three times in my life that I kind of wish I were running Windows. The other that comes to mind is when I wanted to run Jenova Chen’s Cloud (for which I installed Boot Camp just so I could play).

Apparently that software screenscrapes xbox.com, and there’s no real API available as an alternative, so there’s the reason why there isn’t anybody doing this yet.

I’ve been looking for a reason to try out Dashcode, if you send me your xbox.com login info, I’ll see if I can whip something up for you over the next few days. I’ll trade you your widget for a few more PDFs of journal articles that I can’t afford to buy.

Have to keep productive while visiting my Mum this week anyway, and I’m a little burnt out on Kanji study…

Hell, it would be easier just to hack the widget you found. Give me the login info anyway though, so I can test it.

I just used Leopard’s Web Clip feature to make my own widget. Unfortunately, it’s kind of huge (takes up like a quarter of my Dashboard). Alternatively, you could just bookmark xbox.com…

[...] might recall that I recently wished aloud for a Mac Dashboard widget that would list the availability and status of my friends on Xbox Live. [...]

Screen scraping isn’t the way to go with XBOX.com. The site changes constantly — breaking applications that screen scrape (ie. MacLive). Microsoft strongly discourages you from providing your passport Live login to other applications and web sites. Truth be told, an application legitimately accessing the data doesn’t need your Live/Passport information.

Our 1337pwn XBOX Live Friends List dashboard widget and iPhone/iPod Touch application utilize data through via our own server infrastructure. You can check them out at http://1337pwn.com.

With regards to your feedback, we wanted to make things easy to read when you quickly flashed it up the dashboard. Hence, the widget is not tiny. We did experiment with hiding offline gamers, but folks preferred being able to know that a friend just got offline or had played a new game.

Of course, we welcome feedback and comments. Don’t hesitate to send an XBOX Live message to borocouncilman.

Thanks!

[...] back, I implored you, the internet, to make me a Mac Dashboard widget that would quickly and cleanly tell me what my [...]

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Find/Make This For Me: Xbox Friends Widget

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