The other week Scott at work asked me how I manage to find out about interesting gigs to go to - and the answer is that it's mostly through hanging out and getting to know people and getting invited to stuff - however for the slightly more organised gigs I also find trawling the listings on last.fm pretty handy... and it occurred to me that it would be even more handy to have a Dashboard widget on my Mac which could extract said information about what is going on and present it to me in an easily digestible "what's on tonight" kind of format.

So that evening I dug out a copy of Apple's Dashcode, perused the last.fm api documentation and wrote one. And you know what I'm really pleased with it.

So for immediate release and free download I present version 001 of the last.fm Gigometer. It lets you search by location or artist - and while it's not totally polished and search results are somewhat limited by the scope of what you get back from the API it's pretty effective for my purposes. The big issue is that some locations return squat - despite there being plenty of stuff in the system, an issue I'll be exploring with other last.fm developers when I get time. For example "Sheffield" or "Cambridge" just don't work, perhaps to do with my not having specified a country. Also you only get 10 items at a shot which for a big place like London or Manchester is not quite enough. Still, for a quick hack it ain't half bad.

Update! Apple have in their merciful and beneficent way not only listed the gigometer on their dashboard downloads but they've also made it a "Staff Pick". Woot!