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.
 |
iStock.zip (272 KB) |
 |
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.
croesus said
how work windows Xp
Torgeir said
Thank you so wery much! I have been looking for a widget pulling from the international Yahoo!Finance.
K said
This is great! It only allows seven stocks though – any plans to make it more flexible?
Max said
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
Just change another thing… 0.1.3.3. Contact me as soon as u can! Bye
Roar said
Great widget, but it seems to have problems with currencies like EUR= and CHFNOK=X.
Dean said
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
When you keep switching dashboard and finder, the Widget display (where you enter the symbol) gets messy.
Otherwise, great widget!
maba said
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Thanks it’s work….
pvmstg said
The only improvement I can think of is to be able to reorder the list….
shawn said
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
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
Thanks, man, this has been something I have missed for a long time,
W
Dominic said
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
The light background colour can make the info hard to see. Darker background or black font might be an improvement?
maba said
Dominic, Anthony,
thanks for your suggestions. New version will be araound or out after Christmas.
Gary said
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
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
Does anyone know how to display commodities (crude, gold)?
Will said
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
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
Thanks a lot. This was just what I was looking for.
Rudy said
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
Great alternative, i advise all my clients to use it.
iStocks Widget 0.3 said
[...] Website Download iStocks Widget These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Jean Brunet said
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
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
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
By the way, I am using OS X 10.4.6, everything except the color patterns wor.
Oliver L. said
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
Nice post-widget, it is 5 stars. I bookmarked you.
http://info5stars.blogspot.com/
CB said
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
To have the S&P/TSX do: ^GSPTSE.
kasha said
good for know about the economy not stabilize in this day and Im prepared for my budget in future.
Amit Mani said
Awesome product! Thank you!
Florent Eric Paredes said
The limitation of 20 stocks can easily be worked around.
Click on the plus sign of apple widgets located in the bottom left corner.
Pull a second instance of the iStocks widget.
Now it will populate with your list of stocks, indices and currencies of your original portfolio.
Now delete all those indices in your second widget, and add 20 extras.
Your original iStocks widget will retain its original values while your second widget has 20 new values.
If you run out again, pull a third iStocks widget instance.
proxsi
Alex said
Hello,
I like your widget quite a bit, but I cannot figure out how to use the multiple instances feature. Would you please post instructions for using this feature?
Thanks,
Alex
Alex said
Hello again. I figured out how to use multiple instances. Thanks for a great widget!
Rocky said
That’s awesome bro, just downloaded it. But i noticed some issues with 1d and 1w chart. The chart is not rendered as the other period. Is there any workaround?
maba said
Multiple Instances:
for another instance of the widget, use the “+” button on the bottom left of your dashboard screen to expose the palette of your widgets; just click on the istocks widget and it will open another widget instance.
See also this demo on Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/v/kLZLaDptu4w
maba said
1d and 1w rendered different to 3m,1y,2y:
This is due to the fact that Yahoo does not provide quote information for minutes or hours of the recent day or week. Only the pre-rendered yahoo charts contain this information.
clay said
Hi
is it possible to show the whole asx movement as a graph in this widget?
im trying to be able to view the general trends in australia vs my australian stocks
thanks
Frederick Malouf said
Well, the international version of this looks fine, but at present, with the numbe rI have, the numbers go outside the perimeter of the frame, so it looks pretty odd. I want to take a screen shot, but I can’t attach a file anyway. as soon as you send me an email to you with the shot.
Cheers.
Frederick
Stephen Kenny said
Hi,
I’m using the widget on mac 10.4.11, and the value of the Dow Jones index (^DJI) doesn’t show up – the graphs are fine, but the value’s just blank. It all works just fine on my iPhone.
Is it me?
Stephen
Mark T said
Great Widget, It’s like having a ‘market carpet’ at your fingertips.
Thanks so much for taking the time to create this.
On My wish List:
1) More colors please – I have 9 instances on my Dashboard, and would like to use color to visually sort the stocks I’m following by sector…
2) The ability to sort each list alphabetically would be great.
3) Wider columns, please – When you put in a symbol that is 8 or more characters long, it wraps to the next line, but overlaps the next symbol or the chart period selection line. (e.g., Canadian income trusts such as AET-UN.TO)
Again, Thanks, eh!
maba said
Stephen: your suggestions are a great input for the new version, which will be available in the next weeks. Thanks.
Kory said
I’ve just started using the widget and so far enjoy it, my question, though simple, is the following (there will probably be more comments to make when the US markets open on Monday):
Why hasn’t this widget been added to Apple’s Widget’s website?
From what I’ve seen so far, though, and as merely a trader of US stocks, this looks to be a real breath of fresh air compared to Apple’s default chart/board, and thank you for that.
Lynn said
I love this widget, for its flexibility in renaming, color, moving up/down… I just have one question: why do the charts for one day/one week time period show up in its raw version with white background, which does not go well with the theme of the widget, whereas other time periods work perfect? Is there anyway we can work around this? Thanks! Keep up the good work!
xogrizzly said
Hello !
Thanks for iStocks (really more interesting than Stocks).
Just one suggestion : the possibility to hyde the charts with a click (one click : charts “on”, another click : charts “off”) like in Stock.
xogrizzly said
Good morning Martin,
One thing strange : At the same time, the quotes are different between iStocks and Stocks, like if the iStocks’s quotes are delayed for several minutes AFTER the Stocks’s quotes ???
Except this strange delayed quotes, iStocks is fantastic and I use it daily.
Thanks for this great job !
Oliver L. said
Hmm…it’s almost 1PM EST and most of the stocks listed in my widget are still at 0.00% (change)…email Bittorrent and web are all working…methinks these (U.S.-based ETFs) have moved at least 0.01% today (if not 100x or even 1000x more than that).
Gord Edmonds said
Hi
I live in Canada, Love your program, but cannot seem to find a way to get the Toronto Stock Exchange to show in the widget. Am I missing something or is this not a possibility?
Jake said
This widget is a MUST HAVE ! sadly, it isn’t available for Yahoo! widget engine (ex Konfabulator)
Steve said
Cannot get WWY to work. http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:WWY
Ivan Avery Frey said
Gord, the symbol is ^GSPTSE.
Comment for Martin, there is a bug in the widget. When the TSE went up above 11% it was showing 1.1…%.
Great widget. Is there a way of adding a factor to any of the quotes? For example the OIL quote can be multiplied by a factor to give an approximate value for a barrel of oit.
Ivan.
maba said
Ivan, I’ll look into the bug, thanks.
Adding a factor is neither supported nor planned.
xogrizzly, click on the currently selected stock name to hide/expand the chart. Works like the original from Apple.
Martin.
David from France said
Hello,
Do you know why crude oil symbol (CLZ08.NYM) doesn’t works?
Thks
Great widget, really!
Taco Zuidema said
Is it possible to put in google finance for the datat of the stocks?
Il’l love to hear if that is possible
Mike said
Hey, great widget!! Exactly what I was looking for. One suggestion, could you allow the widget’s width to be changed? I like the feature where I can put in my own labels, but there’s not much room to display the labels and when it goes over one line the formatting gets all messed up.
Mike Robins said
I would like to be able to sort the stock list. Can that be done now, or is that an enhancement?
maba said
You can do that by clicking on any green or red value (e.g. “+0,90%”) AND pressing ALT or Command key while you click.
Mike Robins said
Actually what I was talking about was sorting by the name of the stock. What you suggested does not seem to do that.
maba said
OK. Sorting by name is not implemented yet. But your suggestion is valid and I put it on my list for features of the next update.
Parris said
I’d like to comment regarding the rendering for 1-day and 1-week being different than the other views.
The standard widget seems to render the 1-day and 1-week the same as the others, except in the 1-day view it is off by 1 hour. Maba, in your post above on 07/11/08, you stated that the quote data isn’t available for the recent day or week.
How is the standard widget rendering the data if it is not available?
maba said
Hello Parris, the standard widget didn’t use the regular yahoo data sources but an apple.com service (only behind the scenes they grabbed yahoo’s data). I don’t know if it’s still this way, since I haven’t had a look into since last April. Up until April’08, yahoo didn’t publish the data on an hourly or minute basis, which would be required for the 1-day view. I will look into the current state for the next update in the next couple of weeks.
leaf said
thanx for making this brilliant widget.
but i got a problem with getting quotes of futures.
i’ve listed a future “http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SPH09.CME”, on the previous version or Yahoo’s (the blue one), but even though your one is looking better, it can’t find the futures from ‘validating’.
is there any possible way i can list the futures?
thanx
maba said
Hi leaf, futures doesn’t work well with my chosen data source. The next update will support other sources, e.g. the one that Apple’s widget uses.
tk421 said
Unfortunately, yahoo isn’t real-time, unlike Google finance. If this widget could be used with Google Finance, it would really make my day.
Would it be possible someday to add Google support?
Thanks for the work.
maba said
I think it’s US only. However, different Web XML/JSon data sources would be possible and I will look into it and see if I can load the data from some kind of Quote Web API like Yahoo does provide.
Simon said
A mouse-over with full company name would be great, ex. AAPL displaying Apple Inc. on mouse-over.
maba said
Simon, great idea. Thanks.
Amy said
Hi – I am trying to use this widget for commodities such as Live Cattle, Wheat, Corn, etc…
Is this possible??
Thanks!
maba said
Amy, I haven’t tried commodities, so at least it’s not supported. Sorry.
MattP said
Another suggestion for the next version:
Instead of displaying at the bottom “Delayed up to 20 minutes” could the widget display the time corresponding to when the retrieved data was current OR display the time when the data was last updated?
maba said
MattP, your suggestion makes sense and I have included it in my TODOs for next version. Thanks.
Rolf said
My favourite widget. I just updated to version 0.3.1. Great new features. Love it. Thank you very much and best regards from Switzerland.
Jamie said
Hi Maba – Do you have a service to develop this widget a little further? _ I need 9 specific indices & stocks to go on my website. Let me know, thanks, Jamie
Clayton said
Not sure if this bug has been mentioned before, but if you enter longer stock symbols like some of the Canadian Energy trusts, it does a word wrap to a second line. Do this a few times and the formatting is pretty screwed and you can’t even click on chart options below because the symbols over lap into the chart. An example stock symbol would be CPG-UN.to or DAY-UN.to.
Clayton said
Figured out how to fix my problem if anybody is interested.
1. Go to ~/Library/Widget/iStocks
2. Do a ’show package contents’ on iStocks
3. Open up Stocks.css in your favorite text editor
4. On line 85 you will see ‘width: 62px’
5. Change that to ‘width 110px’
6. Restart the widget and now the text field to hold the stock symbol seems to be wide enough to hold my CPG-UN.to
Clayton said
Sorry, I take that back, just re-tested from scratch and it does seem to work fine with this fix.
eobet said
I’m sorry if I missed something obvious, but how does this differ from the Apple stock widget? Both look the same.
Also, if I may have a suggestion: I would like to have the option to display a graph under EACH stock. This might make the widget terribly tall, but perhaps you could click to add more columns instead.
I track about 20 different stock these days, and I rely on the graphs for my analysis, not just the daily numbers.
Zyzzy said
Why did I take so long to find your widget?! The performance ordering is so great, thanks!
I was wondering though, I sometimes get a “no chart data” message when pulling monthly quotes.. is that a Yahoo issue or is it the widget’s?
rick said
hello,
i have started using your widget although i don’t really have need for international support. the reason why is because the standard apple widget does not properly show the 1d graph for me in snow leopard. is anyone else having this issue? your widget shows a different graph for one day but at least it’s a graph i can use! so maybe i’ll just stick with istocks for now thank you,
rick
Alex said
Hi Maba,
I don’t know if you’re still updating this widget, but if you are, a price alert feature (pricey) would be great. So if I set a price alert for AAPL <$150, when the stock falls below that price it shows up in a different color in iStocks.
Wonderful widget. I have 17 instances running on my 2 screen dashboard. I've noticed several good investments that I wouldn't have seen without iStocks.
maba said
I’ve added your suggestion to the list of new features. However, due to lack of time, the next update will be released not before next year.
giampiero said
There is also a version for Windows??
rick said
hello,
i live in an area where daylight savings time is not observed and now since the change all my 1d graphs have a 1hr blank space due to the time change. how can i correct this? i used to have this issue in the default stocks widget from apple and i had to change the javascript somewhere to resolve it…but i don’t know how to do it with istocks???
thanks,
rick