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.



Originally published at http://ialja.blogspot.com/2006/10/essential-widgets-list.html