I thought Dashboard was a pretty impressive piece of eye candy when I first encountered it, but now that Tiger is out and widgets are proliferating faster than porno sites on the Web, I’m actually finding it to be a useful tool that I turn to several times a day. Some of these early widgets are simple hacks of the examples Apple provides to developers, but some are original, as well as useful. Here are a few of my favorites…
First, a couple of utilities:
Widget Manager is the essential Dashboard utility. It lets you inspect, delete, and disable widgets without having to dig around in your Library folder. It installs as a Preference Pane and displays essential information about your widgets’ name, version number, path, and if it’s an Apple widget or third-party widget. Disabling a widget is as easy as clicking a checkbox, and Widget Manager can reload your Dashboard to avoid to display issues.
It would be great if Dashboard could pop up like a screen saver, especially if you have widgets that update their information periodically, like stocks, weather, or RSS widgets. Dasher is a simple utility that makes Dashboard launch itself whenever your Mac has been idle for the interval you specify. Like Widget Manager, it installs as a Preference Pane.
And some personal favorites:
MAYA Design Cards is a deck of playing cards with inspirational quotes on them. Click on a card to flip it over. Click again to see a new quotation. Created by design lab MAYA (they give copies of the limited-edition playing cards to visitors of their lab), the quotes are geared toward designers. But the authors range from Ayn Rand to Shakespeare, whose prediction of Microsoft’s future quoted on one card (”Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable”) is proving to be uncanny.
R2ToDo grabs your incomplete To Do items from iCal and displays them, complete with calendar colors. Clicking on a To Do takes you to the details in iCal.
Type Cast (pictured above) lets you preview fonts and font information. You can preview custom text or the alphabet. Pop-down menus offer quick access to font families, styles, and sizes. Click on Show Font File to reveal the font in the Finder. I also use the preview like a whiteboard, displaying one bold message or reminder.
The VersionTracker widget lists the latest updates to VersionTracker. You can filter the display to show different categories or platforms. If you’re a VersionTracker Pro subscriber, you can search VersionTracker from the widget. If there’s a newer version of software you already have, the widget displays it in red. You can also choose to display content from other channels, including MacFixIt and MacCentral news, and Macworld reviews.
Yahoo! Local Traffic displays real-time traffic reports for your local area (or any area you choose). You specify the radius to monitor (up to 40 miles) and you can filter reports by severity level. If I’m headed into the City (I live about 40 miles north of San Franisco), I check this widget before I leave the house.
These are just a few of the widgets I’ve found worth keeping on my Dashboard. How about you? Please post your recommendations in the Comments.
Widget Manager 1.1.0
Bottom Line: Widget Manager is the essential Dashboard utility.
From: Downtown Software House
Price: Free
Platform: MacintoshDasher 1.0.1
Bottom Line: Dasher is the next best thing to a Dashboard screen saver.
From: Splasm Software
Price: Free
Platform: MacintoshMAYA Design Cards 1.0
Bottom Line: Looking for inspiration? Here’s the deal: get MAYA Design Cards.
From: MAYA Design
Price: Free
Platform: MacintoshR2ToDo 1.1
Bottom Line: R2ToDo won’t let you forget your iCal tasks.
From: Nick Takayama
Price: Free
Platform: MacintoshType Cast 1.0
Bottom Line: If you work with different fonts, Type Cast is a quick way to preview them without opening Font Book.
From: Code Line Communications
Price: Free
Platform: MacintoshVersionTracker Widget 1.0
Bottom Line: Stay on top of the latest software releases with this handy widget.
From: VersionTracker
Price: Free
Platform: MacintoshYahoo! Local Traffic 1.0.1
Bottom Line: If you’re going to sit in traffic, at least you’ll know before you leave the house. Yahoo! Local Traffic…don’t leave home without it!
From: Yahoo!
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh
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May 24th, 2007 at 6:44 am
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