Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Essential Widgets (a list)

Ah, Dashboard Widgets are certainly one of my favorite features of Mac OS X. There are many more or less useful tools disguised as widgets, so I've decided to post a list of my favorite, essential widgets that increase my productivity or just keep me company ;)

Here are the widgets I keep in my Dashboard at all times:
  • Apple Logo - it's just an Apple logo that makes my Dashboard a bit more pretty ;) You can choose your favorite Apple logo color or pattern (my choice is Snow).
  • Calculator - a simple calculator that comes with the OS.
  • Calendar - as the name explains, it's a calendar and it comes with the OS.
  • Dictionary - comes with the OS and lets you search the built-in dictionary.
  • DoBeDo - a widget that shows tasks (ToDos) from iCal. It has many settings, skins, and enables editing and printing of tasks.
  • Easy Currency - a currency converter with many different currencies (even Slovenian tolar). A must for me now that we'll be switching to Euros.
  • iCal Events - as the name explains, this widget shows future events from iCal. A great match for DoBeDo (I even use the same skin for both widgets).
  • Movie Locator - type in a movie title and Safari will open the movie's IMDB page.
  • Screenshot Plus - a great widget for making screenshots without having to remember all those screenshot shortcuts of Mac OS X. You can take screenshots of the entire screen, a widget, a window or part of the screen. The widget also has a preview option.
  • Stickies - an electronic version of PostIt notes that comes with the OS. One of the most useful widgets for me. Currently I have 4 different stickies on my Dashboard (each is of course of a different color).
  • TheDailyGrind - a great widget to keep track of time spent on different projects.
  • Weather - well... it's a weather widget :) It comes with the OS and I just love its look.
  • Wikipedia - search Wikipedia on your Dashboard with this widget.
Useful widgets that I call only when I need them:
  • ColourMod - a sleek widget that lets you pick a color and displays the color's values in HSV, RGB, Hex, CMYK.
  • HTML Tidy Widget - this widget checks HTML code and ads missing tags or points out errors in the code.
  • iChrono - a cool stopwatch.
  • News Reader - an RSS reader that can display RSS feeds from multiple sources. I now use Safari as my RSS reader, but this widget is pretty cool as well.


Note: This is just an archive post. The blog has moved to a new home at blog.ialja.com, where you will also find a copy of the entire blog.