Cool Home Services Widget from WhiteFence

Recommendation: WhiteFence Home Services Guide

WhiteFence has launched a Home Services Guide to educate consumers on the world of home essential services. If you rent or own an apartment or home, I'd recommend subscribing to their RSS feed.

SlashDock 2.6 Universal Binary

Rejoice Intel Mac owners! SlashDock is now available in a universal binary! Find out more in the SlashDock forums.

Customized iTunes Headlines

You can set up your own, customized RSS feeds from the iTunes music store using a simple configuration page created by Apple.

For example, here are the top 10 Rock or Alternative albums:
http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wpa/MRSS/topalbums/sf=143441/genre=000030000/limit=10/rss.xml

Just add the above URL into SlashDock and set the Site Main URL to: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa

I'd like to see some improvements, like support for Podcast listings, Mashups and TV Shows. But it's still a useful way to quickly see what's popular.

SlashDock 2.6 released!

Here's what's new:

• Update to ROME version 0.8


• Add option to filter each site's headlines using a Regular Expression. For example, you might want to filter the DealsOnTheWeb.com feed so that you only see LCDs, Digital Cameras and Powerbooks using the following (Java) regular expression:

  .*(lcd|digital camera|powerbook).*
  

• Fixed bug which caused some 'Application Not Responding' problems.
  
• Add Help menu with additional link to the Community Forums.
  

SlashDock Forums

Open End Software has launched new forums for SlashDock, and MacPoker Pro.

Click over and join in the discussions!

Stock Quotes

Don't use a special application to get Stock Quotes - put them in your Dock with SlashDock!

For a single Stock Quote, add this URL in your Site preferences: http://www.xanadb.com/ticker/aapl

For multiple quotes try:
http://www.xanadb.com/ticker/aapl+icge+msft

Now, when you view this in the Digest you will see a graph for each stock like the one shown here.

Make SlashDock Del.icio.us!

One of the many useful RSS feeds I've found is at del.icio.us. Even if you don't have an account, their constantly updated Popular links are great for browsing with SlashDock.

Just use this URL: http://del.icio.us/rss/popular

If you browse the del.icio.us site, you will see every page has a RSS button/link at the bottom, so if you are only interested in Mac stuff (for instance), you can use this URL:

http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/mac

'Slash' Feed Alternatives

Way back when SlashDock was first introduced, the primary format used by slashdot and all of the sites "powered by slash" used a proprietary format for their feeds. As RSS (and now Atom) have gained popularity, those sites have added support for these formats. The ROME library does not support "slash" so some old feeds will no longer work.

The good news is that there are alternate feeds (RSS) that will work for those sites.

Here are two in particular many users have emailed about:

slashdot.org: http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss
macslash.com: http://macslash.org/rss/macslash.xml

Gmail in SlashDock

Did you know you could access your Gmail Inbox using SlashDock? This is especially handy if you have multiple Gmail accounts.

What you need:

• Your username.
• Your password.
• Latest version of SlashDock
  

Setting it up:

• Open SlashDock preferences (cmd-shift-P).
• Click the Sites tab.
• In the URL/Group text box, enter
  https://username:password@mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom
  (replace username and password with YOUR information, for example: https://mygmailname:password123@mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom)
  
  
• Click the + button, then find the new entry in the Site list. Double-click to add a Name and Description.
• Finally, click the Apply Now button.