Friday Question: Useful Dashboard Widgets? / journal / hicksdesign

24/06/05

Friday Question: Useful Dashboard Widgets?

After that little rant about useless Dashboard widgets, I feel the need to redress the balance. My problem with widgets is that most seem fall into 3 categories:

Searching widgets that are no more convenient than just searching in a browser (especially when most browsers have some way of adding search engines to the default google bar)
Widgets that display information from other apps – viewing iCal events, or unread mail.
Widgets that are just a way of viewing a single RSS feed.

Apart from the default calculator, these are the two that I’ve found worthwhile:

Capture (More than what you can do with keystrokes, it lets you choose filetypes, scale and saving destination)

Google Maps (the one widget that I’ve found to be more convenient than going to the browser)

There must be some useful widgets out there, but maybe there are some little gems that you’ve discovered? Show me your widgets!

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Comments are now closed, but you can still have a jolly time reading what others have left:

Steven Riggins said 1205 days ago:

First off, I have a 5 button mouse (left, right, wheel, side clicks) My thumb button is Dashboard. So I can very fast enable/disable. This makes all the diff in the world to me using DB. 23” screen helps too

Ok now:

FlipClock – Easy to read clock. I have two up, home and Berlin.
Joy of Tech – Nice to see the new comic fast
Dilbert – Same
Google Maps – one click to search, no opening browser, clicking bookmark, clicking in the field, then searching.
Package Tracker – PERFECT example of widgets. Make one when you need it, one click to check status (my mouse btn) Destroy when done
Weather – Two of them, here and L.A. I rarely use but nice to see.
Calculator – always have one up
iCal Events – This rocks! One click – See what is happening in the next three days. Very good widget
Calendar – Quick click to see the date
eVite – Quick status on the party I am hosting

I don’t use netflix – I know what movies are coming heh.

I really like DB because it is a one click stop to see ephemeral data. EPHEMERAL. Quick, glance, go away.

Sean S said 1205 days ago:

I use ShortStat, Weather, and Calendar primarily. I could see how reference widgets, if deployed properly, could potentially become the most useful (see the potentially useful CSSREF widget).

Stickies are also nice on occasion.

Brian said 1205 days ago:

Here are a few I have found useful:

Air Traffic Control: Displays local wifi networks
Typecast: Preview fonts
Marquee: Look up local movies (not sure if this works outside of US)

Give ‘em a look..

Virginia said 1205 days ago:

Typecast is good. I use Weather and Clock all the time, because my partner’s overseas – nice to see what the weather in Colombo is, so I can sympathise! I also find the YellowPages widget (for Australia) to be MUCH faster than going to their stupid website. Dictionary is good on occasion. And StickyBrain has a good widget (although I tend to use the menu bar to access StickyBrain, since it has an easy shortcut).

Dave Foy said 1205 days ago:

The one and only 3rd party dashboard widget I use is the Lorem Ipsum generator, tho I do keep trying others! But I agree, underwhelming is about right.

John Oxton said 1205 days ago:

BBC Radio ‘cos I am always closing the damn pop-up!

Peter J Lambert said 1205 days ago:

I’ve not really used Dashboard a lot, but I think that there’s bound to be some gems in the hundreds of widgets that are being developed.

I agree with you on the Capture widget. It’s so useful to me, as a fairly new Mac user who can’t for the life of me remember what the Prt Scr keystroke is.

I’ve also found the Yellow Pages one useful on occasion. Sometimes I just can’t be bothered going to the browser (or the book).

Timmargh said 1205 days ago:

I can’t live without iCal Events as I forget every appointment I ever make and the Calculator is useful.

The rest – Calendar, Clock and Weather with the latter two set to my brother’s home town (Oswego, Illinois) – are just eye candy.

Timmargh said 1205 days ago:

“10 hours ago” ... ?

Check your server’s clock, Mr. Hicks!

#10

Joshua Marshall said 1204 days ago:

I only tend to use three widgets regularly: Shortstat, Typecast, and Weather.

Every once in a while I use the BBC Radio widget and SudokuFun too, but for the most part I use DashOnOff to turn off Dashboard on my PowerBook to save memory.

It’s not really sparked my imagination yet I’ve got to admit.

#11

Colly said 1204 days ago:

The Ceefax widget. Will mean nothing to anyone outside the UK, but to me it’s great. The real Ceefax is sloooow, but this is instant, and makes great use of shortcuts to flick around pages and grouped pages. Really smart, and great for checking what’s on TV!

Ceefax viewer. Enjoy…

#12

Colly said 1204 days ago:

Bah! Link looked cool in preview.
Ceefax widget: http://www.msephton.plus.com/ceefaxviewer/

#13

Izzy said 1204 days ago:

Classic Notepad – multipage stickies with resizable windows for me please

Dashdock – why clutter the dock with lightly used apps when you can have a dashboard backup that looks every bit as cool

Aside from Capture and Movie Times these are the only widgets I use on a regular basis.

#14

Teevio said 1204 days ago:

I’d have to say that the ColourMod Widget is probably one of the most I’ve seen lately (and I’m not saying that because I made it).

The ColourMod Widget is a quick and easy color picker that functions similar to Photoshops color picker. Perfect for when you need a color but don’t have any graphics programs open.

#15

~bc said 1204 days ago:

Agreed, Mr. Hicks. But, Dashboard is so new that we need to give it time to evolve… and for people to build great stuff for it. I use the calculator and then the rest of the widgets I use can be grouped into one category: widgets that substitute for a webpage that’s a pain to get to, or has other useless junk. Examples: National Weather Service Radar for Boston (MA,US), “Scoreboard” (baseball scores), TV Tracker, and RabbittRadio (listens to NPR feeds). I have downloaded other ones, but they just sit idle at the bottom. In fact, the only ones that are up all the time are the radar calc and scoreboard.

#16

nga said 1204 days ago:

- DashBlog : easy to use Blogger.com poster-widget – Make-A-Pass : Password Generator – Nofelet : reverse telephone-number lookup – Fernsehen 1.1 : what i “miss” on TV : a TV timetable

#17

Wes Childers said 1204 days ago:

Shortstat has been the most useful to me so far (I’m monitoring the stats for 5 sites…. if it was only one the web interface would be just as easy). Also like the default weather widget (weather.com’s advertising slowed the site down so much I hated using it). I’ve got a few others running but none that I wouldn’t clear out to make room for a more useful one.

I think one of the things that keeps me from using some of the widgets is the amount of screen space they require… with a limited amout of room to keep widgets that are constantly running, bloated/oversized UI fluff turns me off pretty quickly.

#18

Nathan said 1204 days ago:

I use the Lorem Ipsum one. The weather one is useful, because of the amount of ads on weather.com. Dashflix, because it’s quicker (if only it could edit the queue). Hula Girl. Free HD Space. Tiny Url, cause you can drag and drop to it. Uptime, because I like to see it.

I mean, I will only use a widget that actually helps me (works quicker than a website). Except the Hula Girl, because it is just that cool.

#19

RoboRanch said 1204 days ago:

I’m liking widgets that add functionality or ease of use to existing applications.

SysStat – I no longer have to use several mini-apps to get system information.

iBiz Widget – great timer for iBiz time tracking.

#20

Brent O'Connor said 1204 days ago:

Jon,

I agree with your assessments. I think most widgets fall into those categories and just like you I don’t find them anymore convent than going to the website. It’s nice to see someone who is a diehard Mac fan not just going instantly gah-gah over the newest Apple trend and to actually think critically about what they are doing.

#21

Lisa McMillan said 1204 days ago:

Hey Jon,

I put up a post of the widgets I think are useful or could be useful at my site. I hope this isn’t spamming – they are specifically for the web developers, so I thought your audience might find them useful.

Best of. Dashboard Edition

#22

Jon Buda said 1204 days ago:

Lisa,

They are incredibly useful! Thanks for the list. I had no idea some of those even existed. The list of widgets is just growing far too fast. I’ll be running out of RAM soon loading them all ;)

#23

Buzz Andersen said 1204 days ago:

I really like the ShortStat widget:

http://www.keeganjones.com/widgets/shortstat/

But it’s only because I’m a total web stats whore :-).

#24

Scot Jandly said 1204 days ago:

i played with the dashboard for a while, trying out a bunch of interesting looking widgets. however, it took too long to load the dashboard each time (i’m on a powerbook, it dragged quite a bit if i hadn’t checked it in a while) and i was never really sold on the idea of widgets in the first place. i tried konfab as well, but never liked that either. the only widget app i ever truly liked and used was samurize, but that’s a pc app. so in the end, i wound up disabling dashboard with dashonoff . i figured it just wasn’t worth keeping around, but that’s just me…maybe future widgets will change my mind.

#25

Chris said 1204 days ago:

* SysStat
* Juice (battery monitor)
* HakoreSMS (SMS to Polish mobile phone networks)
* calendar/capture/counter
* weather & wikipedia

#26

James Adams said 1204 days ago:

It looks like you’ve got some good suggestions so I won’t add to the “must haves” but rather steer you away from a couple real stinkers. They are currently listed as number 2 and 4 on Apple’s home page. iTunesLyrics and SingPod seemed like the answer to all my melodic mumblings while at work. I plugged the old 20GB iPod into the G4 ready to sing along to everything that shuffled into the playlist. Fired up iTunes, hit the familiar F12, put both widgets to work and…...nadda. damn. next song…....nadda, next…...nadda. and on and on and on. I went through over 50 songs, some were mp3’s, some were from CD’s imported into iTunes and some were direct purchases from the Music Store. All failed to produce lyrics for even one song. So, unless someone’s got some insight into making those two work, steer clear. I’ve provided links for both widgets just to be fair and give others the chance to try them out.

#27

Eleanor Holmes said 1203 days ago:

I find most of Tiger relatively underwhelming – Spotlight is nifty, but not customisable in the ways I want; Safari 2.0 is only really useful because it handles feed:// URIs and passes them to NNW properly; the new Mail is ugly as sin.

Equally, I’m not totally chuffed about the widgets, although I do use Dashboard still. There are a few handy ones I use, although nothing I couldn’t live without.

I use:
* a LiveJournal post widget
* a Flickr image uploader widget
* the Transmit widget
* two iterations of the clock, one set to Californian time and one to Brisbane time (hooray for intercontinental relationships :/)
* the standard Weather widget

Plus a few that change depending on mood, that I don’t much care about either way.

#28

Danny said 1203 days ago:

I like the PHP Search widget… I haven’t found it usefull, but I plan I finding it usefull soon.

And TV Tracker is just wicked rad!

#29

Bret Victor said 1203 days ago:

Can I pimp my own? It wont’ be geographically relevant to most of you, but I think it gives a unique demonstration of what a widget is capable of.

BART Widget

Compare it to the official BART website and its Pulldowns Of Pain. And then consider that the widget is a self-contained application—no net needed—so it works on the road (or train, as the case may be).

You are right that most widgets currently are simple front-ends for apps or websites, and don’t really add much value. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Don’t give up on Dashboard!

#30

Ian Atkinson said 1202 days ago:

The few I’ve got that are actually useful rather than just eye candy are systat (easier than running top/mem/df/ifconfig independantly and less cumbersome than activity monitor), the trains one and countdown. The trains one is great! I have is constantly displaying trains from Garforth to Leeds so as I sit and eat my breakfast on a morning I can glance at it and get up to date information on if my train is late and by how long, when the next train is and so on. The countdown timer is counting down the days to my big summer holiday (35 days, yay!).

My major beef with widgets is the amount of memory they take up. The other day the dictionary one was using up 194Mb of RAM, I mean, WTF does an app as tiny as that /do/ with all that memory!?

#31

Albert Lombarte said 1202 days ago:

I didn’t find it useful and is a high mem consumer so I decided to turn it off

#32

Simon said 1201 days ago:

I really like the ShortStat Widget as well and the iCal Events.. The Transmit one is quite nice to !

#33

Lisa McMillan said 1201 days ago:

Anyone know of a widget that shows the temperature of your powerbook?

#34

Brad Chmielewski said 1201 days ago:

My favorite is iCliplite, since I don’t own iClip it is nice to have a place to store these. It even saves after a restart. Also like the Currency Tracker always good to see how your money is doing. =)

#35

Sage said 1199 days ago:

Jon, have you seen the Widget Machine ? There are some pretty nice widgets there – the one I use the most is iClip Lite, which is basically a really nice clipboard. I also like Wimic , although it doesn’t have the slick Apple-like styling of the widgets from the Widget Machine.

#36

Josh said 1193 days ago:

Here’s another widget…

CSS Cheat Sheet

#37

Edmund Fladung said 1192 days ago:

I use the unit converter to convert between meters and inches (architecture stuff). Other than that, I find widgets to be more eye-candy then anything else. Yes, they are 1.0 and someone will find a usefulness for them eventually, but i’m skeptical.