Tracking stocks can be fun on the Mac, thanks to the Dashboard. However, my home stock market is Germany and Apple’s Stocks dashboard widget, which comes with Mac OS X 10.4, only displays quotes and charts of US stocks. (Actually it’s a limitation of Apple’s quote server and not of the code.) There are 2200 registered widgets available currently, with some dozens of them related to international stock markets. It’s sad, but none of these widgets were as nice or useful for me as Apple’s.
So, with a little time to spare today, I’ve completed a small hack which I had on my Todo list for quite a long time. iStocks Widget is a modification (aka patch or clone) of the original Stocks widget which pulls its stock information from the international Yahoo quotes servers. So basically, you can track any stock as long as there’s a corresponding Yahoo symbol. The symbols usually carry information about the stock exchange location, like “SIE.DE” is Siemens, XETRA, Germany.
I’ve put the release at 0.1, since I’m not quite sure if the Yahoo URLs are stable. I’ve tested it against some random stocks (which all worked fine). BTW, you will notice that the intraday and weekly charts are images from Yahoo (they are not rendered via Quartz as the rest). The problem here is that 15-minute and hourly quotes are not available yet for international stocks. I think Yahoo is about to provide them when its new Yahoo Finance Charts will be announced officially.
Martin said
Thanks for this great Widget! I tried the Widget “Aktienkurse” a few months ago but the UI was crap. As Apples Widget has a great UI patching it really sounds like a good idea. One minor issue are the unreadable Yahoo IDs, especially for WKNs in Germany. Would be nice if the labels are configurable but so far I can live with that
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Dennis said
This is really a kick-ass widget… Not to sound wild or anything – but damn i have searched a long time for a Widget, to show the danish OMC C20 index and the Danish Stocks! Thanks a lot!
Andre Kvist Aronsen said
Thanks for a really cool widget! I also have searched the web for a couple of weeks now looking for just this. I had some problems with changing the labels though, so I just edited the patches.diff file to use the stocks I want (^GDAXI, OPERA.OL, TROLL.OL, EURNOK=X and SAP), and that works apart from one thing – the current stock values and changes dont show up on the right to the labels, just blank fields. What could be the problem here? The graphing is fine though, so the data is retrieved right, I think.
Simon said
Thanks for a really great widget!
I was looking so long for a widget like this – I can’t believe there aren’t more non-US people who want to track stock prices.
I even downloaded Yahoo’s widget engine – but its not a real dashboard widget,
Thanks!
sundigger2088 said
Awesome. Rocks. thanks much.
Great stock widget « Notes Floating Around said
[...] 2007 Posted by sundigger2088 in Digital. trackback Highly recommended. Thanks to Martin ’s iStock Widget. And Apple, of course. Excellence. Note that the Blue colour skin can be [...]
jesper said
Very nice – but has stopped working now. Maybe URLs are moved?
maba said
jesper, it’s working fine for me on. I’m using 10.4.9. Please check again.
andre said
So far I love it a lot, thanks for the development. One question however, I like to have seperate widgets for the different markets i follow. Say for example I have one widget with Americas (Indices & Stocks), Europe (Indicies & Stocks)… etc Now it seems to me that when I have two iStocks Widgets open on dash board, my original one only updates when interacted with. Any thoughts?
Tinavjw said
Good work! I like it!
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pod said
This is a really cool widget. I wish I could find something similar to put on my website at , as it’s missing a quote function at the moment.
Penny said
I love this widget too but it gets confusing when the stock abbreviation goes to two lines for a few stocks and you can’t tell which stock is highlighted to create the graph at the bottom. Sometimes it’s easy to *guess by looking at the monetary value, but it’s not great. Can you fix? Thanks so much.
Penny said
Mea culpa. I just read the instructions. Doh. I can rename my stocks. Thank you for this wonderful widget.
Erik said
Hi!
I never could get warm with Dashboard – think a normal Programm on a second Monitor is better.
Regards, Erik
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John said
I have not tried istock widget. Based on this discussion board i m going to give it a try.
Daily stock picks said
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Great place for newbies like myself and also for advanced traders, wonderful place to learn and interact with the community.
sandrar said
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.