A couple of weeks ago, I was searching for a way to have Adium show up my currently playing game on Xbox Live. Windows Live messenger automatically does this but seeing that I only have 2 buddies on that and more than a dozen on Yahoo Messenger, that feature is useless to me. I was surprised that no one has done it yet, it just seems like there is an Adium Xtra for everything now. I found out why, there isn’t a publicly available API for Xbox Live, only a select number of developers can access it.

Looking for a workaround, I stumbled upon a Twitter app by Duncan Mackenzie that kinda does what I wanted, replacing Twitter with Adium. He was kind enough to create a service that relays the Xbox Live data and make it available to those working on small sites or writing scripts.

Anyhoo, a whole afternoon and four cups of coffee later, I was able to create my very first AppleScript in the form of an Adium Xtra. I know it’s not exactly a feat since AppleScripts are very easy to write but it just warms my heart a little bit when I contribute something, even if it’s not the most useful thing in the world.

Usage instructions and download link are detailed on the Xbox Live Status Adium Xtras page.

Late last year, I made a somewhat snarky post about WiGO and their free WiFi service. I admit, I was a little hard on them, after all they were just starting out and naturally they would not try to roll out features all at once. Now that they have enough time to settle in and get comfortable, maybe it’s time to give them a fair review.

Armed with my MacBook and iPhone, I went to the Power Plant Mall last weekend. WiGO blankets the whole mall and surrounding areas, which is awesome. I can be anywhere and still get a signal but I’ve decided to stay at my favorite coffee shop, find a comfortable spot and order a latte. I woke my MacBook from sleep, connected to the WiGO hotspot and launched the WigoBar application which I downloaded from their website. On the Mac, the application is a Java jar file which is really jenky but will do until they realize that it sucks and write a proper Cocoa application. So anyway, I launched my browser, logged-in on their customized welcome page and off I go, pretty much free to do anything I want.

Now there is a bit of a problem here, the WigoBar. Remember the bar that sits on top of all your windows and display ads? That bar and the business model behind it died during the dot-com bust. Now, WiGO dug it out from the grave and renewed its sole purpose of annoying the hell out of us.

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