TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Dashboard, introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), gives users quick and easy access to mini-applications called widgets that can provide a variety of information and help users accomplish common tasks. On Apple’s Dashboard widgets download page there are a ton of different widgets available. While I’ve tried a bunch of them, there are many more that I have yet to play with. Of the ones I’ve tried, here are the 10 best and most useful Dashboard widgets that I have used.

1. iStat Pro

There’s a variety of different system monitoring widgets, but this one is my favorite. It displays all of your system’s information you could want. It does take up a lot of screen real estate in Dashboard, but you can configure it to only show the information you care about. Despite it being a really nice looking and useful tool, it has crashed on me before.

2. Radar in Motion

The weather forecast widget that Apple includes with Dashboard by default is pretty good for your general forecast and current conditions information. However, it doesn’t show you radar. Using Radar in Motion, you can easily see a time lapse radar map for the area around your location. There are many different weather widgets available for Dashboard, but I like this one the best. There’s a Weather Bug widget but its included radar is tiny in comparison to Radar in Motion, and to see a larger version you have to go to their ad-filled website. Simply double-click on the widget to get a larger version of the weather map.

3. Google Search

This widget, included with Mac OS X 10.4.4 and higher, instantly lets you search Google (including web, images, groups, news, local, and Froogle) right from Dashboard. Need I say more?

4. Gas

Pulling its data from GasPriceWatch.com, this widget gives you information on gas prices around your area so you can find which station near you is selling gas the cheapest. Clicking on a gas station opens its location in Google Maps so you can find it easily. You can check any grade of gas and also register to be a spotter so you can submit the gas prices you’ve seen. All in all quite a handy widget that could save you money.

5. Yahoo! Local Search

This is a pretty new, but very useful widget. You can quickly locate different points of interest (restaurants, movie theaters, etc) around a specific area and get contact information and driving directions easily. There’s a print button that takes you to a web page with the directions on them so it can be easily printed.

6. ESPN / Sports Illustrated

Okay, so ESPN is another widget included by default with OS X 10.4.4 and higher. If you like up to the minute sports scores and news in a convenient location, this widget does that for you. The Sports Illustrated widget (not included by default) does the exact same thing as the ESPN widget, however it displays a nice photo of some swimsuit models on the back.

7. iClip Lite

This is a handy little widget that helps you manage your clipboard contents in an easy to use, and cool manner. It lets you store multiple things at once and copy them back to the clipboard, from images to text to URLs. Probably one of the most useful widgets for increasing your productivity.

8. RSS Reader

If you subscribe to RSS feeds of different sites, this is a widget that will let you quickly check them for new posts. Click on a headline and it will open in your browser. Hopefully while you’re trying this one out, add the RSS feed to this site.

9. GPeek

It seems like almost everyone has a Gmail account these days. Since you probably have one, this widget is great for seeing if you have new email in your Gmail account. Not only does it show you the number of new messages in your inbox, it shows who it’s from and even displays the beginning of the message. Pretty nifty.

10. APOD Viewer

So now that you have all these widgets on your Dashboard showing you all kinds of stuff, why not spruce it up a bit with some cool pictures from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site? You can browse through past pictures and read up on what picture you’re looking at. It’s a great way to make checking your Dashboard more interesting.

11. Say Cheese

Alright so this is number 11 on a top 10 list. I just had to add Say Cheese, a comic viewer for many different comics. You can browse past comics with ease. Well, if it’s so great, why not part of the top 10? Well, the problem is this widget that I used to use all the time doesn’t seem to work on my MacBook Pro these days. It hasn’t been updated in awhile and doesn’t appear to be functional (at least for me). I hope a new release comes out eventually, since when it did work for me I used it daily to keep up with the latest comics.

Fine. I’ll admit these might not be the best and most useful Dashboard widgets out there, but these are the ones I like to use. If you have a better one, let me know!