Dashboard

Apple’s new take on desktop applets. Here are a few I find marginally useful, although I haven’t used any of them more than once:

• ZX Spectrum - productivity, destroyed.
• Go Go Ball - a bouncy red ball. Just to pick a nice example of something utterly irrelevant, trivially simple, but extremely well implemented.
• Guia TV - Portuguese cable channels.
• Shiira Mini Browser - good to keep track of MRTG stuff.
• Depth of Field
• Backpack Widget - utterly brilliant.
• CSS Cheat Sheet - a quick CSS reference (well, quick if you consider Dashboard quick, of course).
• ColourMod - another color picker.
• Picker - an HTML color picker that copies hex values to the clipboard.
• WikitiWidget - a simple desktop wiki.
• tailDash - console log viewer.
• Air Traffic Control - lists Wi-Fi access points.
• Remind - a front-end for the CLI utility with the same name.
• SysStat - shows relevant system information (instead of wimpy meaningless graphics).

Interestingly enough, widgets appear to be downloadable from the Net without any security warnings, which is pretty dumb considering the things can access pretty much everything on your system. I expect Apple to fix this really soon. Update: It sort of got fixed, and next up on the fix list is uninstalling them, but not having them permanently visible. Bad implementation, I say…

• Place widgets on the dashboard by typing defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES && killall Dock and then holding them with the mouse while switching out of Dashboard.
• Jackfield, a Gnome application that emulates Dashboard in many ways.
• Disable Dashboard by typing defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES at a terminal prompt.
• Build a Dashboard Widget
• Dashboard Development Tutorial