Mac Apps
Although Dashboard received a huge amount of attention when it was originally released, it has since become a fairly standard feature of OS X. Thousands of different widgets are available – some far more useful than others.
Today I’ll be taking a look at 10 widgets that really stand out from the crowd, and have something unique and interesting to offer you in your day-to-day computer use. I hope you find a few of them useful!
iStat Nano
iStat Nano
iStat nano is a system monitoring widget with a tiny footprint and a beautifully animated user interface. It can show a range of different in-depth information about your Mac, and is completely customisable. Although it’s a touch geeky, it can be genuinely useful to gain a quick picture of how much disk space you have remaining, discover your IP address, or take a look at your CPU usage.
Price: Free
Developer: iSlayer
Twidget
Twidget
Twidget is a free Dashboard Widget for OS X that allows you to update your Twitter status. It isn’t going to challenge Tweetie for the Twitter client crown, but offers a quick and handy way to check recent updates and post a new message – particularly if you’re a very casual user of the service. Nicely designed, simple, and completely free.
Price: Free
Developer: Aquabox
Screenshot Plus
Screenshot Plus
Screenshot Plus can take full screen captures, grab portions of the screen, and even capture windows, desktop icons, and other widgets. Captures may be saved to the clipboard or to the hard drive, or they may be exported to any application directly from the widget. It supports a range of formats, and is a slightly more advanced alternative to OS X’s native screen capture tools.
Price: Free
Developer: Steven Chaitoff
Currency Converter
Currency Converter
A great widget, that I feel should be bundled with the operating system by default. Currency Converter supports over 200 different currencies but, most importantly, works reliably and accurately. I use it regularly, and it’s a real time-saver compared to visiting a currency conversion site or using Google.
Price: Free
Developer: Palple Software
Time Machine Buddy
Time Machine Buddy
If you’re having problems with Time Machine (or wondering why on earth it’s taking so long!), this widget can be a real help. It organises and displays the systems logs generated when backing up, allowing you to quickly tell what is happening behind the scenes for the backup in progress or any previous backups.
Price: Free
Developer: BlueDog
Eject Volume
Eject Volume
Eject Volume displays a quick and simple list of all the volumes currently mounted in OS X, and allows you to eject all the active volumes on your system in a very handy way. It’s considerably quicker than locating them on your desktop and dragging to the Trash (particularly if you have a very messy desktop!)
Price: Free
Developer: OffByte
HSLider
HSLider
Targeted at developers using CSS, this Dashboard widget uses HSL sliders and text fields to tweak colors. Copying the new color as valid CSS (hex, RGB, or HSL) is easy. A real time saver if you regularly work with color as a designer.
Price: Free
Developer: Brandan Lennox
iTube
iTube
If you’re like me, you often find yourself wondering what the video is to a particular song in iTunes. This widget helps to satisfy that urge, and saves you surfing around the web searching for it. Very handy!
Price: Free
Developer: Philip Andrews
Wikipedia Widget
Wikipedia Widget
The reference book for our generation, Wikipedia is full of useful knowledge and research. This widget makes all that accessible from your Dashboard, and even allows you to make edits if the information you come across is a little suspect.
Price: Free
Developer: Sean Billig
Delivery Status
Delivery Status Touch
This is a wonderful widget for tracking the progress of a parcel, and (unlike many) works with a variety of different international stores and shipping services. Really well designed with an impressive interface, and Growl support to notify you when the status of your package changes.
Price: Free
Developer: Junecloud
Conclusion
Dashboard has matured and grown impressively over the past few years, and a number of thoroughly useful widgets are available. If you’d like to explore more, Apple’s directory of Dashboard widgets is a great place to start. Have fun, and by all means share your favourites in the comments!
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Actually… there already is a currency converter by default.
You can set the standard unit converter to currency.
Not as good looking though…
I probably get way more use out of the Lorem Ipsum widget than I would have ever thought possible. I wish I had known about Delivery Status before the holidays though!
One question though: am I correct that widgets stay in RAM even after you close your dashboard? Say I have 20 widgets, some of which are quite big, will it affect my work when I close the dashboard?
Check your Activity Monitor before opening and after closing the Dashboard and see if it changes usage. I imagine it stays there.
Yes! Widgets use your RAM in background, although if is closed
Delivery status is my favorite dashboard widget– it’s companion on the iphone is a great way to keep track of incoming and outgoing shipments. More than once I’ve been working and gotten a growl notification that there was a UPS package sitting on my front doorstep.
Totally agree got it when it was on sale and never regretted it
if you have packages delivered to your house and have a mac/iphone
you should own this app!
I found iTube awhile ago and thought the idea of it was pretty sweet.
Once its running though, it always seems to be 10 seconds or so behind the song that is playing. Lame…
I just got iTube. I like it a lot. I didn’t think I would be using it a lot. But I do.
Great list :) I don’t really use such features but it is always nice to be aware of what is available.
Great list! I’ve been looking for some useful dashboard apps to try and utilise it more.
These are really useful!
What I can strongly recommend: Save your RAM and GET RID of any of these. All this stuff is available online or on your computer. Get rid of widgets, you’re not using them daily right?
For example to find currency—type “(number) (currency) to (currency)” to Google and voila there is your information, you don’t need to have running currency application in the background all the day don’t you? For any other use quicksilver, much more faster and efficient.
Make your life simpler=faster.
And if you need to tweak a color in your CSS, just pop open Photoshop real quick and use their color picker, right? ;-)
Dashboard is consuming 57MB out of my 4GB of RAM (about 1%) to run 8 widgets. It’s negligible. Plus the whole point of Dashboard is one-click access to an assortment of tools, so you don’t have to find/open your browser, visit Google, be aware of the domain-specific language Google uses to convert things, wait on an HTTP round trip, etc.
This is my favourite! For searching album in iTunes (AWESOME!) link!
I’ll nominate Dashnote, which is clean, simple and immensely useful if you already use Simplenote for the iPhone.
I use “Stop Dashboard” (http://www.natal.be/2005/10/stopdashboard-widget/)on a daily basis. Basically it unloads all your widgets, freeing your RAM.
good share thanks for this