Widgets for Mac OS X
iStocks Widget: International Quotes
The iStocks Widget displays quotes and historical charts for international stocks, indices and currencies.
The widget is provided as freeware and is based on Apple’s Stock widget, which is shipped with Mac OS X. This original widget is limited to US symbols only. iStocks overcomes this limitation and uses the international Yahoo services.
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iStock.zip (272 KB) |
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iStocks-Manual.pdf (1,3 MB) |
| Version: | 0.3.1 |
| Release Date: | April 10th, 2008 |
| License: | Freeware |
| Requirements: | Mac OS X 10.4.10+ or 10.5 |
| Localization: | English, German, French, Italian |
Notable features include: option to sort by performance; support for multiple widget instances and 5 different color themes; renaming and reordering of symbols; robust chart fetching by using several fallback data sources; update notification; symbol lookup and suggestions; support for currencies; extended precision for quotes and changes.
See also the full manual as HTML.
Disclaimer
The iStocks widget is provided AS IS, without warranty of any kind, expressed or implied, including without limitation the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of this widget is borne by you. Should the installation or operation of the iStocks widget prove defective, you assume the entire cost of any service and repair. The provider, Martin Backschat, is not responsible for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages of any character including, but not limited to, damages for loss of goodwill, work stoppage, computer failure or malfunction, or any and all other commercial damages or losses.
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croesus said,
September 29, 2006 @ 1:48 pm
how work windows Xp
Torgeir said,
November 13, 2006 @ 12:17 am
Thank you so wery much! I have been looking for a widget pulling from the international Yahoo!Finance.
K said,
November 29, 2006 @ 5:45 pm
This is great! It only allows seven stocks though - any plans to make it more flexible?
Max said,
December 8, 2006 @ 7:09 pm
Martin, I translated your Widget in Italian and French languages.
Then I fix some little problem on the widget, and I added a new feature: Symbol Lookup.
Restored original color (I prefere)… and now I would like to publish on my blog the work.
But before I would like to contact you with e-mail. Now you have my email address, please contact me so I can show my fix, and if you’ll like it you could include it in next version (I called my version 0.1.3.2 continuing yours counter).
Max
P.s: Forgive my poor english.
Max said,
December 9, 2006 @ 1:58 am
Just change another thing… 0.1.3.3. Contact me as soon as u can! Bye
Roar said,
January 12, 2007 @ 7:48 am
Great widget, but it seems to have problems with currencies like EUR= and CHFNOK=X.
Dean said,
February 5, 2007 @ 11:48 pm
Greetings,
I noticed your chart widget for stocks. I am trying to build a charting widget for displaying data charts for calculation of performance measurements. Where these chart mechanisms built only with the dashboard toolkit, or can these charts be deployed to multiple platforms? i.e. delivered through flash on multiple pda’s or platforms
Best,
Dean
Rens said,
February 6, 2007 @ 10:14 am
When you keep switching dashboard and finder, the Widget display (where you enter the symbol) gets messy.
Otherwise, great widget!
maba said,
February 8, 2007 @ 10:37 pm
Dean, the chart mechanisms use the HTML element CANVAS for rendering. The chart information is obtained through Yahoo’s new Web API, which is currently not made public. But look for “http:” in the source code of the widget to locate my way of calling the API.
Rens et al, thanks for the issue reports; in the next couple of days I will post a minor update and try to adress them.
Simon said,
February 28, 2007 @ 2:18 pm
Hi I just noticed that when you double click on a stock it takes you to the quote.com website instead of Yahoo finance.
I changed it in my version and it works fine. Just a suggestion…
cheers, Simon
caewok said,
June 20, 2007 @ 5:28 pm
To add to K’s comment from Nov. 2006 — on my system, the widget will allow more than 7 stocks to be entered, but the display does not resize correctly, making it impossible to view long lists of stocks.
Apple’s stock widget refuses to list more than 20 stocks, and I am still looking for a widget that could display more (I have the screen real estate for it). Multiple portfolios would be nice, and would allow for many more stocks to be displayed without taking up a lot of space.
Simon said,
July 24, 2007 @ 6:03 pm
Great concept, but every time you turn the widget over it adds the list of stocks to itself in the list and the ‘Done’ and ‘Remove’ buttons multiply.
I can live with that though, for the convenience of being able to watch stocks from several different exchanges.
Dan said,
September 12, 2007 @ 5:54 pm
I’m having a problem with this widget reseting to its defaults whenever I either reboot my computer or refresh the widget. The portfolio I’ve entered disappears and I’m left with one of the default stocks (yes, just one. It seems to remember that I’ve deleted all the others.) I’ve seen that some others have had this problem but I’m having trouble finding a solution.
weiyun said,
September 18, 2007 @ 11:59 am
Fantastic. One issue though, version 0.1.3.1 seemed to only display up to 2 decimal places. This is problematic for many of the stocks on the ASX (Sydney Stock Exchange). There’s a need for at least 3 decimal places.
Hans said,
October 26, 2007 @ 8:44 am
There is a problem with the application window. If you have more then 6 to 8 entries the window will not resize automatically. Part of the information is not visible then, also no graph will be displayed.
Marius said,
October 31, 2007 @ 5:18 pm
great idea. unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work under leopard. i can’t change the default entrys of the widget to insert my personal stocks. the “i” button to flip the widget around isn’t available at all.
pvmstg said,
November 9, 2007 @ 2:50 pm
Hi… nice but you said you could show currency… I try without success. I use the same letters than in yahoo site without success.
EUR=CAD CAD=USD etc with and without space or ” ”
Help
maba said,
November 9, 2007 @ 3:10 pm
pvmstg, the syntax is quite awkward. EURUSD=X for example works. I modified the first screenshot in this page to contain this currency conversion as an example.
pvmstg said,
November 9, 2007 @ 7:46 pm
Thanks it’s work….
pvmstg said,
November 9, 2007 @ 7:53 pm
The only improvement I can think of is to be able to reorder the list….
shawn said,
November 16, 2007 @ 9:46 am
hi, thank alot for this, while i’m still waiting for yahoo! widget to be leopard compatible.
was just wondering if we could rearrange the stocks? let’s say we want to rearrange it, we have to remove everything and add it in the order we want.
could we also rename the stocks?
i know i’m asking for alot, but i was just dreaming..
thanks alot once again!
Ron Teather said,
November 16, 2007 @ 6:05 pm
Hi Martin,
I’ve been happily using the previous version of iStocks for some time, and I want to start by thanking you for a creating a very useful utility. Unfortunately I’m having trouble with your latest version, 0.2, so I thought I would send you a bug report.
During the install, dashboard shows the widget panel with overlaid text in red that says:
“Reversed (or previously applied) patch detected! Assume -R? [n] Apply anyway? [n] 12 of 12 hunks Ignored -
- saving rejects to file”
When I click “keep”, the installed widget doesn’t accept any inputs. cmd-R starts a swirl transition, and the widget then has 4 panels, a “Y!” in the bottom left corner (no obvious function), and no “i” in the bottom right…….it still doesn’t seem to accept any inputs.
I’ve been through the install several times, of course….also tried a restart, and deleted plist and widget files between installs.
I’m running 10.4.11 on a 1.5 GHz PPC G4 Powerbook.
Hope you can help….and thanks again for a nice utility (meanwhile, at least I can reinstall and enjoy v 0.1.3.1)
Ron
William Klippgen said,
November 28, 2007 @ 3:12 am
Thanks, man, this has been something I have missed for a long time,
W
Dominic said,
November 28, 2007 @ 5:45 pm
Can it be tweaked so we stock and index names on the main interface.
Plus some other stock widgets are able to give us not just historic data but gainers and losers in indices (see http://www.broes.nl as a good example of the kind of content I mean.).
Any chance you can build that in?
Cool if you can. You have a functionally much better widget than that supplied with OS X.
Anthony said,
December 6, 2007 @ 1:56 pm
The light background colour can make the info hard to see. Darker background or black font might be an improvement?
maba said,
December 7, 2007 @ 2:58 pm
Dominic, Anthony,
thanks for your suggestions. New version will be araound or out after Christmas.
Gary said,
January 5, 2008 @ 10:05 am
Hi Martin,
Thanks for this great tool.
I’m wondering whether anyone has this problem. I’m unable to add the symbol ^DJI. I’ve tested with version 0.2.1 and 0.2.2.
I’m running 10.5.1 on MB.
kevin.l said,
January 10, 2008 @ 3:27 am
This widget has plenty of potential. You could probably even add features to show/hide columns with more information or change it to include the actual name of the stock rather than just the symbol. Cool work. Love it.
erniemslx said,
January 22, 2008 @ 12:24 pm
Does anyone know how to display commodities (crude, gold)?
Will said,
January 22, 2008 @ 7:20 pm
Wow, I was getting so frustrated with the standard stocks widget, and just when I was about to give up finding an alternative I found this by Googling. You should consider getting it listed on the widets page Apple has online. Thanks again for an aweseom widget!
D said,
January 23, 2008 @ 12:23 am
Yippie! A salvation! Not being abl to use ^DJI was driving me nuts. I agree with Will. THis saved me from looking for an alteraitive.
PaulM said,
February 8, 2008 @ 2:53 pm
Thanks a lot. This was just what I was looking for.
Rudy said,
March 3, 2008 @ 8:13 am
Nice improvement over the default one. Only allows 20 stocks though. Can you remove this limitation? I’d like to have the widget stretch the whole vertical screen space.
acmeir.com said,
March 25, 2008 @ 5:23 am
Great alternative, i advise all my clients to use it.
iStocks Widget 0.3 said,
April 4, 2008 @ 1:40 pm
[...] Website Download iStocks Widget These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Jean Brunet said,
April 8, 2008 @ 3:52 pm
Hi!
I was looking forward for a product like this, operating the TSE. How do I get mutual funds (ex: rbf266 from the Royal Bank of Canada)? Top window overlaps with bottom window. If I had an e-mail I could send you a screen shot. Thanks.
Jean Brunet said,
April 8, 2008 @ 7:05 pm
HI!
Me again,
I can fix the overlap by changing the names of the stocks. I am still having problem with mutual funds (ex: RBF266).
maba said,
April 9, 2008 @ 9:45 am
Jean, mutual funds are not really working for now (v0.3.0).
I’m still working on it. The problem is that Yahoo Finance treats funds different and doesn’t provide much information about mutual funds, like historic data and chart images. At least to my knowledge. But quotes are available and proper support is already on my to-do list.
Jean Brunet said,
April 9, 2008 @ 7:48 pm
By the way, I am using OS X 10.4.6, everything except the color patterns wor.
Oliver L. said,
April 23, 2008 @ 3:56 pm
Works well except for periodically gets a weird graphical error (I uploaded a screenshot to the URL above so you can see.)
Happens only on my laptop, not my desktop (former is Powerbook running 10.4.11 with FileVault-enabled.)
Info5Stars said,
April 29, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
Nice post-widget, it is 5 stars. I bookmarked you.
http://info5stars.blogspot.com/
CB said,
May 2, 2008 @ 8:14 pm
How to add the Toronto Stock Exchange indices, such as the S&P/TSX Composite Index? The symbol should be TSX-I but it does not work. Thanks for any help.
Jean Brunet said,
May 3, 2008 @ 4:44 am
To have the S&P/TSX do: ^GSPTSE.
kasha said,
May 8, 2008 @ 8:34 am
good for know about the economy not stabilize in this day and Im prepared for my budget in future.