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 Aloha,

after quite some time I thought it's time again for a little blog post. During one of my travels I've created a little tool in Swift that works on the latest version of Apple's MacOS operating system called Sonoma. 

The main thing that was interesting to me is the fact that you now also can have widgets on MacOS. So I've created a little tool called JDKMonitor which is also available in the MacOS App Store.

Because I always forget when the next update and release of the OpenJDK project is scheduled I thought why not creating a widget that simply tells me the date and the number of days I have to wait.

Because you cannot simply create a standalone widget but it has to come with an application, JDKMonitor also offers some addional functionality. 

It will show you the dates of the next OpenJDK update and release, lets you download one of the last 4 Long Term Support versions (LTS), either as Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or as Java Development Kit (JDK) and if available, it will also give you the opportunity to download a version bundled with JavaFX.

The downloads are based on Azul's build of OpenJDK named Zulu which you can download and use for free also in production. You can also click a link that will open the Azul Zulu download page in your default browser and if you want to read the release notes of the latest LTS builds of OpenJDK it will also offer you a link to that.

The following images show the application and the available widgets that you can place on your desktop. When you click on the widget, it will open JDKMonitor.

As you can see on the image above, it contains an image of Jay, the foojay mascott and if you click on it, it will open the foojay.io page in your default browser to get the latest news from the Java community :)

All in all it's nothing very special but fun...so keep coding...