Today in WoW - iOS Scriptable.app Widget

2020/12/11

It’s December 2020 and the last post on this blog was in February 2019, I am clearly bad at this whole blog thing. But I made a thing and I want to tell you about it.

To skip the boring introduction, click here to go straight to the installation steps.

Earlier this year I ditched my Blackberry and got an iPhone SE (2nd gen). It’s actually pretty good, there’s actually not much I miss from Android so the transfer was quite painless.

Then iOS 14 rolled around and introduced widgets, which gave rise to a whole new ecosystem of apps. Around that time I also discovered Scriptable which was just adding support for custom made widgets written in JavaScript in beta, so I started tinkering with it.

Today in WoW Widget

As someone who still plays WoW, I always wanted Wowhead’s Today in WoW frontpage section as a widget or something on my phone, somewhere handy. And so, quite quickly after I started tinkering with Scriptable, I realized I could do just that!

And now the 1.0 version of my Today in WoW widget is complete. It tries to mimic the Wowhead frontpage look, and it displays information about the Shadowlands Covenant calling quests, current open Torghast wings, the active Shadowlands world boss and current weekly Mythic+ affixes. The affix icons can even be tapped to open a Wowhead page in your browser, so you can read about it more.

Here’s what it looks like:

Today in WoW widget screenshot

Installation

Now on to the good stuff. The installation steps are all documented in my GitLab repository which you’ll need to visit to grab the scripts anyway, but I’ll also write down the steps here.

  1. Install Scriptable
  2. Place Today in WoW.js and scriptable-require.js in the Scriptable folder on your iCloud Drive
  3. (Optional) Edit the Today in WoW.js script to configure it (See the Configuration section below)
  4. Add a Scriptable widget to the home screen and while still in edit mode, tap on the widget to configure it
  5. In the widget configuration, select the Today in WoW script, the When interacting and Parameter fields aren’t important
  6. Tap away from the widget configuration modal

Configuration

Edit the Today in WoW.js script to adjust the configuration of the widget. Currently supports region and faction, and defaults to EU Horde.

The future

I am definitely not done working on this widget but I consider it good enough to release it into the wild as 1.0 even though I am sure there’re some flaws.

I want to add more features to the widget, like Battle.Net API integration so you could see for example if your selected char has done the calling quests or killed the boss. Perhaps I’ll make it more configurable so you could select what information to display without much scripting involved, the code is already pretty modular I’d say.

I hope this widget will be useful to more people than just me, if you do use it, I’d like to hear about it, my contact details are below :)

~ Vildravn

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