I wrote a few days ago about using ImageWell to quickly resize images, but I’ve discovered an even easier and faster way: just drag and drop an image on the Image Shackle Dashboard widget. You can resize the image using a slider, or set a default width or height. There’s also an option to automatically convert images, such as PNG files saved from screen captures, into JPEG. I haven’t found an easier way to scale images for uploading to the web.

Via ProBlogger.

Bottom Line: Scaling your images is now as easy as drag and drop.
From: Cre8tivegroup
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh (Universal)

Universal. Mike Piontek

Universal. Nathan Barkei

Jun Wen Lau

Bottom Line: You don’t need a TV to enjoy this little HBO widget.
From: HBO
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

The game seems simple enough. Every puzzle, whether super easy or hair-pulling, is composed of a modest 9×9 grid comprised of 3×3 subgrids. Each column, row, and subgrid must contain only one of the numbers 1 through 9. A handful of numbers are provided and the remaining numbers must be deduced through logical analysis and elimination.

Fortunately, there’s no need to buy expensive books to satisfying your addiction. There are several programs available for the Mac that will allow you to play and print an endless supply of puzzles at every level of difficulty. I’ll mention a few here, including one that also runs on Windows (Sudoku Susser). If you use Windows and can recommend some other Sudoku programs, please post a comment.

Sudoku Widget

Putting Sudoku in your Dashboard is risky, at least if you want to get any work done during the day, but this widget will do the trick when you need a quick fix.

Sudoku Widget 1.5
Bottom Line: Not the only Sudoku widget, but clearly the best. Four levels of difficulty, shows possible answers, times games, and tracks high scores.
From: Brian DeBoer
Price: Free

SudokuDan

This freeware program is only at version 0.2.2, but it looks very promising.

SudokuDan 0.2.2
Bottom Line: SudokuDan can generate Sudoku books so you can print your own, and it has a slick Mac interface.
From: Daniel P. Valentine
Price: Free

Sudoku Susser

This is probably the ultimate Sudoku program, at least on the Mac. The list of features is so extensive that I won’t even bother to start listing them here. It can be a bit daunting, but it’s also the best program to learn about Sudoku since it can hilight various patterns.

Sudoku Susser 2.5.2
Bottom Line: The ultimate Sudoku app. The others are worth a look, but Sudoku Susser is essential for every Sudoku addict.
From: Robert Woodhead
Price: Tipware (free, but tips are encouraged)
Platform: Macintosh and Windows

The announcement that Yahoo! was buying Konfabulator seems to be stirring up a lot of interest in Dashboard widgets, if my site logs are any indication. Looking for new widgets that are worth a mention, I stumbled on the ColourMod Dashboard widget and the COLOURlovers site within moments of each other. Both sites are about color (and both sites link to each other), so I thought I’d mention them here together. If you love color, you’ll be interested in both of these.

COLOURlovers, a Daily Pick on MyYahoo! today, is a great source of color inspiration. Register as a colour lover and you can submit colors (you can use ColourMod to pick your color) and create color palettes. Other lovers can vote on your colors. You can see what colors are popular (my first submission, almost_ocean, was the top rated color for about 15 seconds), and you can search for colors and palettes based on color names, numbers, and Pantone numbers. You can add favorite lovers, palettes, and colours to your profile, and add comments to posted colors. Think of COLOURlovers as Flickr for colors.

The ColourMod Dashboard widget is a handy color picker, similar to the color picker in Photoshop. You can select a color or manually enter Hue, Saturation, and Value (brightness), RGB values, or Hex codes.

ColorMod is also available in a plug-n-play version for use with Web applications (see COLOURlovers for a good example).

Check out COLOURlovers, and be sure to vote for almost_ocean.

Also, be sure to check out the ColourMod site, which drips with lucious, coloricious design.

Bottom Line: ColourMod puts a handy color picker on your Dashboard.
From: Stephen Hallgren
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

I’ve written elsewhere about my wish for a Dashboard widget that would track my site stats, and I’m happy to report that someone has finally come up with one. The ShortStat Widget from Keegan Jones—drawing on stats from Shaun Inman’s ShortStat—lets you check your hits, uniques, and recent referrers at a glance. But setting it up takes a little work. Here’s how…

First, create a database to hold your stat data (your host should provide instructions on how to create a database). You’ll need information about your database to configure ShortStat.

Then, go to the ShortStat Widget site. You’ll find links to everything you need from this page. Download ShortStat, the Gateway file, and the ShortStat Widget.

Follow the instructions in the Read Me included with the ShortStat package to install ShortStat on your server. Then upload the Gateway file to your ShortStat directory.

You’ll find some tips on using ShortStat with Moveable Type, Textpattern, and Wordpress in the “Playing Nice with ShortStat” entry on Shaun Inman’s site. Since I use Textpattern (1.0rc3), here’s what I did to set up ShortStat with Textpattern (thanks to John Hicks):

Add this line to the Index.php file in your home directory:

include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."/shortstat/inc.stats.php")

My Index.php file looks like this :

To block your own IP address, you’ll need to make a few changes to your configuration.php and inc.stats.php files (thanks to John Nunemaker).

Add this line to your configuration.php file (replacing x.x.x.x with your IP address, which you can find at WhatIsMyIP.com):

$exclude = array('x.x.x.x');

This section of the configuration.php file should look like this:

$shortstat = true; // False is off
$exclude = array('x.x.x.x');
?>

Put an if statement around the mysql_query function in your inc.stats.php file. So, this line:

@mysql_query($query);
}


Should look like this:

if ( !in_array($ip, $exclude) ){
@mysql_query($query);
}
}


Now when you check your stats, you shouldn’t see any of your own activity on your site.

ShortStats is great for getting a quick sense of your site traffic, but for more detailed stats, here are two free services to try:

StatCounter lets you track your site without having to display a link to StatCounter, but your log file is limited to the last 100 visitors.

AddFreeStats doesn’t limit your log file, but you have to display a link (see the bottom of the column on the right).

Note that both services work by tracking code embedded in your pages. If you have more than one page template, you’ll need to embed the code into every page (or page template) in your site.

If anyone has any other recommendations, please post a comment.

Bottom Line: ShotStat Widget is a great way to get a quick take on your Web stats.
From: Keegan Jones
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

The steady parade of new Dashboard widgets has become my latest hit parade, with my favorite widgets taking a prominent position on my screen, then falling out of favor to make room for the new. Here’s a handful of new widgets that are front and center on my Dashboard.

Actually, this first one I mention only because of the many visitors to this site who are in search of “os x nude widget,” “beautiful nude widget women,” and “naked women widget.” This widget may or may not be workplace safe, depending on your workplace (I work at home). The OhBad widget displays the Lessons of Seduction from Aubade on your desktop. Aubade is a lingerie company, and the OhBad widget displays images of their scantily-clad models and their lessons, such as “Cultiver la mystére.” The photographs are quite nice, but the widget is small and the lessons, in French, almost impossible to read (at least on my 30″ Cinema Display). I also suspect it’s full of copyright violations. But if you’re interested in this kind of thing, now you know. I only found it because the same developer makes InGrid, noted below…

The DailyTao (pictured above) displays a different chapter of the Tao Te Ching each day, taking passages from the Stephen Mitchell translation. This ancient text by Lao-tsu, who may have been a contemporary of Confucius, is, according to Mitchell, “the classic manual on the art of living, written in a style of gemlike lucidity, radiant with humor and grace and largeheartedness and deep wisdom: one of the wonders of the world.” If he’d had the chance, Lao-tzu would have written it on a Mac.

iChrono is a simple stopwatch, a handy one-trick pony. Occasionally, I need to time something I’m testing. If you have a use for this kind of thing, iChrono does the job.

If your Dashboard is not only cluttered, but looks like a strong breeze blew in your window and scattered your widgets at random, InGrid can help you restore some sense of order. Launch the InGrid widget and it superimposes a grid over your Dashboard. Drag it to the top left corner so it covers your entire screen, then drag new widgets over the grid to align them. It’s not an ideal solution—you have to quit already open widgets and relaunch them to align them, and they don’t snap into place—but if you have some patience, it’s a worthwhile aide. Apple should implement something like Keynote’s alignment guides for the Dashboard, but until then there’s InGrid.

I use My Yahoo! as my home page, so with the My Yahoo! widget, Package Tracker widget, and the Stock Quotes widget, I have almost everything I need from my home page right on my Dashboard. The My Yahoo! widget grabs the latest headlines from all of your My Yahoo! news sources and you can toggle source, time, and summary displays. There’s a Yahoo! search box at the bottom of the widget, along with notification of new emails if you use Yahoo! mail.

Stats for AdSense is a handy little widget, but I think it should be shaped like a piggy bank. It automatically updates your stats from AdSense at an interval of your choosing (anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes) and shows your earnings for the week, including the current day. Clicking on the Stats logo also logs you directly into your AdSense account so you can view extended reports. Now if only someone would create a widget that does the same thing for my site logs.

The Wikipedia Widget lets you browse Wikipedia. You can search Wikipedia and view the results within the widget. Click the ? and the widget displays a special random entry. Click again for another entry. My random entry today: “Stephenie LaGrossa (born December 6, 1979) is a contestant in Survivor: Palau who was the last Ulong member standing before she was subsumed into Koror.” You never know what you’ll learn!

DailyTao 1.1
Bottom Line: A bit of ancient wisdom to start your day.
From: GlenSoft
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

iChrono 1.1
Bottom Line: An elegant stopwatch.
From: TOSSEN
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

InGrid 1.3
Bottom Line: Restore order to your Dashboard.
From: Skalp & DrakeDave Inc.
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

My Yahoo! 1.0
Bottom Line: Better than a My Yahoo! home page.
From: Yahoo Inc.
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

OhBad 0.2
Bottom Line: You, too, can learn the Lessons of Seduction!
From: Skalp & DrakeDave Inc.
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

Stats for AdSense 1.0
Bottom Line: Count those pennies!
From: TigerWidgets.co.uk
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

Wikipedia Widget 0.8.6b
Bottom Line: The perfect Dictionary companion.
From: Sean Billig
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

Ashed, by Baji Lives displays your choice of images in a gallery window on your Dashboard. It comes with more than 50 photographs, pleasing enough in themselves, but you can replace the default images with your own.

I suppose it’s just a matter of time before a widget that updates porno nude women from the Web is available. In the meantime, you’ll need to acquire the images on your own. You’ll also need to dig inside the Ashed widget package to use it with your images. That might intimidate some users, but it isn’t as difficult as it sounds.

To change the images, find the Ashed.wdgt file and Control-click on it to bring up the contextual menu. Select Show Package Contents to open the package. Then open the Read-Me plus Converter LOOK HERE folder. You’ll find complete instructions and an Automator application to help you prep your images. Load up your favorite porno nude women, or whatever you happen to be into, and you’re good to go.

My Dashboard is slowly turning into my desktop photo gallery. First I discovered the Daily Dose widget, which displays the daily image from the daily dose of imagery photoblog.

Today I stumbled on the Low Overhead widget created by Johnny Larocque of Lost Boys Studios, which displays 200 different images from photographer Mark Robert Halper’s Low Overhead series. This series of portraits of beautiful women, taken in a space where they didn’t have enough room to stand, captures a range of reactions as they attempt to cope with their constraints. Relax: as Larocque notes, this “widget will not get you into trouble at work.”

The widget includes three times as many images as are included in Halper’s Low Overhead book, to be released in June. Aside from his portraits of women in cramped spaces, Halper’s work includes advertising, celebrity, corporate, editorial, portrait, still life, and architectural images. You can visit his studio here.

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: Macintosh

Dasher 1.0.1
Bottom Line: Dasher is the next best thing to a Dashboard screen saver.
From: Splasm Software
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

MAYA Design Cards 1.0
Bottom Line: Looking for inspiration? Here’s the deal: get MAYA Design Cards.
From: MAYA Design
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

R2ToDo 1.1
Bottom Line: R2ToDo won’t let you forget your iCal tasks.
From: Nick Takayama
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

Type 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: Macintosh

VersionTracker Widget 1.0
Bottom Line: Stay on top of the latest software releases with this handy widget.
From: VersionTracker
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh

Yahoo! 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

I just stumbled on this while searching for new widgets and, while it may not be the most exciting widget, I was even more excited to discover the daily dose of imagery.

The Daily Dose widget grabs the latest photo from the daily dose photoblog and displays it on your Dashboard. The daily does of imagery is the work of Sam Javanrouh, who started the “experimental project as a visual practice.” I haven’t followed his images back very far in time (the site displays a single new image each day and you can scan back day by day), but judging by the past few weeks, I’d say his experiment is working. I like his eye.

He also offers an extensive list of links, which I’ll be perusing soon. Check it out.