So many cool little widgets to choose from. I didn’t used to use Dashboard much. I kept forgetting it was down there in my dock, but I’ve been using it more and more lately.
Some of my current favs:
iStat Pro. I use this one a lot. It tells you just about everything about your computer, and some things you probably don’t even want to know right down to how your cooling fans are doing. The reason I got it was it keeps track of my internet downloading and uploading since the date of my last restart. That way I can keep track of my usage so my ISP doesn’t yell at me again.
TV Forecast. This one’s very useful. I hate slogging through regular TV listings, whether they’re in the newspaper, online on on my DVR. This is so much quicker, cleaner and more elegant. You type in your favorite shows and it tells you when they’re on next so I needn’t waste time finding out tonight’s episode is a repeat.
Starry Night. This one’s just for fun. It’s like the regular program but leaner. It quickly shows you what’s in your sky right now.
Then I’ve got some of the usual stuff. Current weather & temperature, calculator, calendar and a measurements converter.
Dictionary – I use it a ton in writing and reading, it’s just ridiculously helpful.
iStat Nano – just replace iStat Pro. I like having the extra fee space, and Pro crashed from time to time rather annoyingly.
BBC Radio
Utility Button – it’s faster than clicking through the system when a program is crashing.
PerCount
And right now, I have Dash Sign up, reminding me to do my taxes.
In addition to some of the ones people have already mentioned, I have:
Storij, which shows how much free space I have on my hard drive
Gas, which shows the cheapest gas prices in a defined radius
Galleria, which shows color schemes from ColorSchemer. It’s fairly useless, but it’s kind of fun to have as inspiration when I’m working on jewelry.
Dictionary/Thesaurus; 5 day weather forecast, “Sing that iTune” which shows lyrics for current songs in iTunes. I need to load one of the feeds for river levels (for floating my raft).
[ul]
[li]Easy Currency: for currency calculations[/li][li]Weather: 3 locations in the US close to friends/family, 3 in Japan[/li][li]TremorSkimmer: earthquake news and sun clock in one[/li][li]World Clock: San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago, London, for keeping track of time zones[/li][li]CurrencyTracker: JPY-USD, JPY-EUR, USD-EUR[/li][li]Gold Price[/li][li]Stocks: tracking 2 indexes and about 8 stocks[/li][/ul]
I have a few others that I’ve downloaded or are access tools that came with programs (like Delicious Library) but I don’t commonly run them. Those above are the ones that are always loaded. I prefer to keep them running in the widget-space even though it’s possible to run them on the desktop. I want the info readily available but don’t want them taking up space that I could be using for something else, so I have a hotkey (F8) assigned to it. I use F12 for Spotlight since I’ve got Cmd+Space ingrained in muscle-memory for switching keyboard layouts/input methods since way back in OS 9 and I use both Japanese and English on a daily basis.
I used to run Konfabulator (before it became Yahoo Widgets) when I was still on Panther. It chewed up resources sometimes. The Tiger implementation of the same basic idea is much better, faster, less resource-intensive, and isn’t branded as a Yahoo product. I have YW running on my wife’s XP machine, though, since there’s nothing else comparable in the Windows world unless you install Vista, something which I have no intention of ever doing.
Same here. Although I saw a friend working on her MacBook, and her use of stickies on the dashboard as virtual post-it notes has convinced me to give it another try when I eventually re-install tiger.
Basically the same as the website. There’s a little search window, you type something in, and the wikipedia entry shows up. I guess it’s really only awesome if you love wikipedia to begin with, lol.
I don’t use it. More to the point, it appears to have those widgets running at all times, which means the more cool Dashboard widgets, the more RAM is being sucked down by the Dashboard.
