Do you want to skip all this text and just get the widget?
Then click here.

Having received earlier this week a letter from Vidéotron, my ISP, about my account getting capped at 100GB monthly in the upcoming months, I decided I needed an easy way to monitor my monthly bandwidth usage. A Dashboard widget was a good fit.

I downloaded a couple of widget samples from Apple.com, and started a new widget from there.

The end result:



A nice little widget, sitting on my Dashboard, that can tell me how much of my monthly quota I've used so far.
Preferences are: Vidéotron username (something that looks like vlxxxxxx), and the upload and download quotas applied to your account. At this time, those quotas can be separate for upload and download, or combined into just one quota.

Note: I had to data-scrape an HTML page to fetch the information from Vidéotron website, and decided it was much easier to do that in PHP, and keep it on my own web server, than to do it in JavaScript and have to release a new version of my widget each time Vidéotron would change their web page.
So if you install this, and see an outgoing connection to dataproxy.pommepause.com, that's normal.
(BTW, I posted the source of the PHP script this widget is using here.)

Enjoy, fellow Vidéotron users.

You can download the latest version of the Vidéotron Internet Usage Monitor widget for Mac OS X here, or on Apple, or on i use this, or on MacUpdate, or on DashboardWidgets, or on Version Tracker.

Changelog:
1.1.6 - Better handling for wrong username; people entering anything else than their VLXXXXXX Vidéotron username will now get a relevant error message.
1.1.5 - Fetch new data less often; was previously checking for new data every 15 minutes when the Dashboard was open; changed that to once a day.
1.1.4 - Added small arrows on meters to show the current date. If the meter is higher than the arrow, it means you've transferred too much in regard to the current date versus the date you're invoiced. Red arrow = bad; green arrow = good.
1.1.3 - Beta for 1.1.4
1.1.2 - Small visual changes: loading animated GIF, numbers formatted as 0.xx instead of .xx.
1.1.1 - New French localization option; new minimal look option; fixed incorrect dates (all dates were one month early).
1.0.1 - Fixed missing percentage when using combined quota.
1.0 - First version.