The OS X dashboard. What a brilliant invention. I press F12 about 9,000 times a day. The dashboard makes life on my computer - and life in general - a little bit easier. Here are the dashboard widgets I’m currently using. I use all of them every day and none of them not every day.
My Dashboard
Above is a screenshot of my dashboard (taken with one of the widgets I’ll mention in a second); let’s find out more.
Starting in the top left:
Phone Book: I recycle my yellow pages the day I get it. This little guy is all I use when I need a phone number or address. If you click on the phone number it comes up in Large Type.
Dictionary & Thesaurus: I use this thing every day. Learning new words, and helping increase my blogging vocabulary.
Junior Mint: At a glance stats of the total (Since Christmas ‘06), daily or hourly hits and unique visits to The Fight Spot.
Calendar: Hey what’s the date next Thursday? Um… the 19th.
Calculator: 2+2=4 every time. This thing is good.
Weather: Kansas City’s Daily forecast. This basically tells me if I’m wearing flip flops today or not.
Stickies: Miscelaneous info, that I need to jot down quickly end up here. I don’t let them become my todo list though.
Capture: I use this for almost every blog post with pictures. What a life saver. [Via Paul.]
You can get more widgets from the Apple website.
What dashboard widgets are you using? Or do you use another widget program?
Tomorrow find out what programs I use every day that I paid for.
Phil said:
Shawn, do you not find that Dashboard takes up loads of your RAM running that many widgets? I have about 3 I run on my iMac (Weather, iStat Nano, Calculator) and 1 on my iBook. The widgets just abosrb too much RAM for my liking!
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 7:02 am
{Shawn} said:
@ Phil: I hadn’t even thought about that. All in all my widgets are using up about 100MB of Real Memory according to Activity Monitor.
That is a lot, but the trade off may be worth it since I use these widgets every day. I could get by with one sticky note and put away the phone book though.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 7:12 am
Evan Olsen said:
Have you ever seen the Fart widget? It makes a random fart sound every time you click it.
The campus staff at our church goes kinda nuts with that one.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 8:43 am
Yuri said:
Which ones don’t work when you’re not online?
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 9:05 am
Benjamin Wood said:
My favorite widget is the nacho libre widget… i have like 30 widgets running all the time on my comp. i never realized they took up that much space before. Oh well time to start cleaning em up.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 9:07 am
{Shawn} said:
@ Phil: I’m going to try using Quicksilver’s dictionary / Thesaurus plugin for a while and see if I like it better than the widget. And speaking of Quicksilver and memory do you know of any ways to slim it down or does it already run at it’s minimum?
@ Jeff: Andys Mac finds is a great series. I’m glad you mentioned it.
@ Yuri: The Junior Mint doesn’t work when I”m offline nor does the yellow pages widget. Also the weather widget won’t update but still displays from it’s last sync.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 9:13 am
Phil said:
@Shawn: I don’t know much, the only thing I am aware of is to keep the catalog as trimmed as possible.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 9:31 am
Ducky said:
I consult my weather widget most often. But my favorite widget is the most useless: a lava lamp. (It moves! And changes colors!)
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 9:40 am
Benjamin Wood said:
how come shawn never comments back at me, i think he hates me.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 10:30 am
{Shawn} said:
@ Benjamin: I don’t hate you. I just usually only comment back on comments that are more conversational or that I have opinions on already. But you’re the only one I send text messages to while drumming.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 11:45 am
Jacquie said:
Since I’m a PC user, I have come to enjoy Google Desktop as an alternative. I am currently using a “To Do” list gadget, a display of incoming emails to my Gmail account or Outlook emails when I’m working, my Google Calendar, and a Task Tracker gadget that I love, because it helps me track how much time I spend on different projects I’m working on. I have a different program that I downloaded off a website to keep an eye on the weather which has it’s own little logo in my toolbar that shows me the temperature at all times and more info if I choose to click on it.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 2:20 pm
David said:
No widgets=fast Mac mini.(Needs all the help it can get).
-David
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Aaron James said:
I’ll admit that I downloaded the Chuck Norris quotes widgett. Every time I F12 I learn something new about Chuck.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 2:44 pm
{Shawn} said:
@ David: I have secretly downloaded and installed the Norris widget on a few friend’s computers.
Posted on April 19, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Tour My Mac: Applications Worth Paying For | The Fight Spot said:
[…] This is the final post from the Tour My Mac series. If you missed any you can check them out here, here, here, here and here. […]
Posted on April 20, 2007 at 5:34 am