Widgets!
Recently I posted about some of my favorite Mac freeware. This week, I’m writing to talk about what I keep on my Dashboard.
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Built-in Apple Widgets
Cost: Free* (included with OS X Tiger)
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iClip Lite
Cost: Free.
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iStat Nano
Cost: Free.
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Air Traffic Control
Cost: Free
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Wikipedia
Cost: Free
I use several of the built-in Apple widgets on a near daily basis. On my Dashboard I have Calculator, Calendar, Stocks, Dictionary, Weather, Unit Converter and Translation. These are simple, quick apps that I can turn to in a pinch. After all, that is the purpose of the Dashboard.
iClip Lite is a fantastically simple widget that expands the storage capacity of your clipboard. It’s quite useful for keeping quick snippets of information, especially if you are copying from several different sources and pasting them into one document (e.g. URLs into a weblog entry).
iStat Nano is perhaps my favorite system monitoring application of all time. It’s small, efficient layout gives information about one system aspect at a time (e.g. memory usage, CPU usage), but most of the time, that’s all I really want. One mouse click switches between the different categories. If you have a lot of space on your Dashboard (and I do mean a lot of space), you might consider iStat Pro, which provides the same information on one large pane.
There are a number of wireless network monitors availible for the Dashboard, but I like Air Traffic Control the best. It has a nice, compact interface that identifies what wireless network your connected to and expands to show what’s around you.
This widget is a recent discovery, but I’ve come to love it. It provides a compact, familiar interface to the Wikipedia, the online, user-edited encyclopedia. The interface is a little small for some of the pages, particularly pages with images. Overall, though, the widget is quite useful.
