MacAdSense: Simple AdSense Widget for Mac OS X
June 10th 2007: Since two weeks I’m using Mac OS X as my main desktop operating system and one thing I soon missed was the wonderful SysSense tool informing me about my Google AdSense earnings. I quickly found some Dashboard widgets claiming to do likely the same as SysSense. But, possibly because Google changed the way of authentication recently, none of these tools worked.
For me as a developer that was a welcome motivation to write my own and very first Mac OS X widget. After reading tutorials like Build a Dashboard Widget by Andrew Anderson, and Andrew Hedges’s Developing Dashboard Widgets I started programming. As reference I strongly recommend Apple’s Dashboard Programming Topics.
Features
It’s quite simple. MacAdSense shows your AdSense earnings, click count, eCPM values for the current month, and the extrapolated earnings for the whole month (by using a very simple rule of three method) on your dashboard. All values are updated every 20 minutes.
Similar tools are using a much faster frequency, but for me 20 minutes is quite fast enough. To everyone who wants a more faster update: Guys, don’t spend the whole day watching your dashboard. ;)
Additional Features:
- MacAdSense is small, the download is exactly 40 KB “big”.
- It’s written in PHP so you can read and change the code if you want.
- It’s published under the GPL license, so after your changes you’re allowed to redistribute it.
- Runs on Intel and PPC Macs.
System Requirements:
- Mac OS X 10.4 or later (Intel or PPC)
- 88 KB free on disk
Screenshots
Let’s take a quick look at this widget:

At the widget’s front side you see the total earnings for the current month, the time the widget last updated, the number of clicks, the eCPM value and the extrapolated earnings for the whole month.
At the back side you see the widget’s setting: Your AdSense username and password. In a future version you’ll be able to give your widget a unique name or another color to distinguish it from other widgets and to get the ability to monitor multiple AdSense account.
Download and Install
To install the widget please follow these few, little and simple steps:
- Download the latest version from here.
- Double click the downloaded file to extract the archive.
- Now double click the extracted package to install the widget to your dashboard.
- On the dashboard move your mouse pointer over the widget and wait some moments. A little i will appear on the right lower corner.
- Click on that i and you’ll get to the widgets back side.
- Enter your AdSense credentials and click the done button.
- The widget now switches back to the front side and after a view seconds you will see your AdSense data.
If you encounter any problems in using this piece of software please feel free to get in contact with me.
Change Log
2007-06-10: Initial release of first version. (Version 0.1)
2007-06-12: Username and password are now stored in your systems keychain. (Version 0.2)
2007-07-05: Fixing minor bug when showing US$ values above 999. (Version 0.3)
2007-10-07: Google recently changed login API (Version 0.4)
2007-11-30: Small bugfix, see comments from November 30th below. (Version 0.5)
2008-01-13: Google changed login API again (Version 0.6)
2008-07-27: Format change according eCPM value, and another login API change (Version 0.7)
2009-09-01: Snow Leopard Compatibility Update (Version 0.8)
2009-10-05: Google changed login API again and another Snow Leopard Compatibility Update (Version 0.9)
To-Dos
Just don’t forget the future:
20 minutes rule to avoid high frequency querys to AdSense serverStore credentials in keychain- Allow multiple AdSense accounts
- Find a better way update the keychain (if there is one day a GData API for AdSense)
- Simple currency conversion
Copyright and Licence
Copyright (C) 2007-2009 Kai ‘Oswald’ Seidler, http://oswaldism.de
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
Additional Credits
This software contains some code snippets taken from amznVibe at WebmasterWorld and was heavily inspired by Jud Stephenson’s Adsense widget.
AdSense is a trademark by Google Inc. and neither this software nor the author is affiliated in any way with Google Inc.


Tim