Comments on: OS X: Fandango Movie Theaters widget

By: Justin Thomas

Justin Thomas — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:23:17 +0000

I did some digging into the widget on a buddies working leopard machine and discovered the widget in leopard is different than the one everyone has been using in tiger. There is now a new script called moviesparser.js in the following location

/System/Library/WidgetResources/.parsers/

And Apple is no longer grabbing data from Fandango directly they are polling from themselves. I was able to make the leopard widget work on tiger in safari just testing by copying those two files. It will not work yet in the dashboard.

By: Randy Kaempen

Randy Kaempen — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:23:49 +0000

This widget seems to work for me in Leopard, but it shows a runtime of over 2 hours for most movies. Movies which are listed on Fandango’s website as 1:24 show as 2:24 in the widget. They have a bad calculation somewhere.

By: Justin Thomas

Justin Thomas — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:22:34 +0000

I think I may be on to something as for why this is not working for non leopard users. Gonna need some help from someone with a working copy on leopard. If you open the widget to view internal files there is a javascript source file called parser.js, this contains the javascript to poll Fandango for the movie data. It is using the following URL to poll the data

“http://www.fandango.com/frdi?pid=A99D3D1A-774C-4914-9E3B-18645117428A&op=performancesbypostalcodesearch&verbosity=1&postalcode=”

If you put this into your web browser the fandango site returns the following error code:

The partner id ‘A99D3D1A-774C-4914-9E3B-18645117428A’ is not valid or is not recognized.

You can see that the pid from the url is being rejected by their code, my conclusion is that the newer widget in leopard is using a working partner id code and the fix may be as easy as modifying the id code in the older versions with the working one from the newer version in leopard.

If someone with a working copy would like to help please post here the pid from the parser.js file within the widget. To access the contents of the widget, locate the widget file in library/widgets then right click and select show package contents. The parser.js file will be in there and can be viewed with textmate or any other text editor.

Thanks,
Justin

By: pat ferris

pat ferris — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:00:47 +0000

I have the same problem as the others have written. I have a new imac and the latest leopard. it worked yesterday and then when I switched the cupertino address that it came with – ‘invalid’. when i connect with the ‘i’ it is going to a website without www and it says error. can you help?
thanks

By: Avo

Avo — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:05:05 +0000

Which means Apple deliberately broke it for Tiger …

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 01:13:08 +0000

Here is how to fix it:
I had this widget before I switched to leopard.
So, just delete the widget and a new one will appear.
This one works.
Take care.
Benjamin

By: mpmchugh

mpmchugh — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 08:15:04 +0000

Check and see if you have a Movies widget in your user ~/Library/Widgets folder. If so delete is, and Dashboard will use the newly installed on at /Library/Widgets., which will work.

-mpm

By: Leigh

Leigh — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:42:39 +0000

Does this widget only work on Leopard? I can’t even find it on the dashboard page on apple.com … anyone know what’s up

By: Chris Tucker

Chris Tucker — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:19:27 +0000

I emailed Fandango about this, and was told, “Well, it works for ME.”

Screw ‘em!

By: Dean

Dean — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 02:17:09 +0000

***THIS JUST IN*** This widget comes/works with Leopard!!!