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What’s in your dashboard?

Written on December 15, 2005 by Josh Pigford and 24 people have commented

Since the launch of Tiger back in April, I’ve found myself using Dashboard less and less other than a “Hey guys, look at this sweet feature.” that I throw at friends. That being said, I do use a couple of widgets pretty religiously.

The ones I “can’t live without” are:
• Unit Converter
• Phonebook
• Gas
• Lorem Ipsum (for design/development)
• Package Tracker
• Marquee

What are you “must have” widgets?

And for what it’s worth, here’s a screenshot of my dashboard:
Josh\'s Dashboard

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  1. #1 Andew says:

    i was curious of what “web frog” is you have on your dashboard?

  2. #2 Josh Pigford says:

    It’s a unicode encoder from Kelibo.

  3. #3 Andew says:

    and have you ever made any word press themes? yours is very impressive.

  4. #4 Josh Pigford says:

    Hi Andrew, yeah, I did this one.

  5. #5 Dan Bruno says:

    I use the Dictionary/Thesaurus one, the Calendar one, and iCal Events. That’s it.

    Dashboard is definitely not all it’s cracked up to be, I have to say. If the ctrl-cmd-D thing for dictionary lookup worked in Firefox, I’d probably never use it at all.

  6. #6 Jason says:

    I have a iBook 12 inch.I have found that miniStat is a valuable tool that gives me system information such as how many full charge cycles I have on my battery. It also tells me how much Hard Drive space I have free. It tells me the temp of my CPU and my battery. It also gives me a run down on my network traffic up and down. Another widget that I have found useful is called uptime. It shows you how long you system has been turned on. I usally just close te lid on my notebook an let it go to sleep. I just checked last night and it had been on for 11 days. So I thought that it would be a good idea to reboot.

  7. #7 Andew says:

    i have a 17″ Powerbook G4 and i use my dashboard quite often. i have a number of things i use on a daily basis like: the Dictionary, google maps, Hardstat, airport radar, AirTraffic Control, and marquee. these are things that i use regularly. so all in all my dashboard comes in very handy.

  8. #8 Donny says:

    There is a pizza joint called joey’s where I live and they have this sweet deal where if the first letter of your last name coincides with the day of the month, example: A-1st B-2nd C-3rd etc. You get half off. Sure everytime I go there I experience various things such as shards of metal and rubber bands in the pizza, fires, food prepared by chefs with ungodly heigene, but at the price for what you get who can complain? One of the best things is how the pepperonis on the pizza curl up into little bowls when cooked and then fill with meat grease so you can take shots of grease before eating the pizza. Anyway, I wish I had the knowledge to design a widget that would tell me which letter was the winner for each day. Then I would have a cross list referencing all my friends with that letter and their phone number conveniently listed beside their name. Maybe even design an automated system in which a prerecorded voice automatically calls them and leaves them a message invitaing them to Joey’s. Man that would be so wicked cool. Any ideas?

  9. #9 Jason Terhorst says:

    Well, I use the calculator for my grades, and the weather widget when I’m at school, since I don’t have a window in my dorm room. And the clock is there, simply because I haven’t really removed it. I used to use TV Tracker, but it’s having issues now.

  10. #10 Kyle says:

    What’s that MySQL widget you have running? Looks like something I could really put to use.

  11. #11 Josh Pigford says:

    @Andrew - I use Mint to do some stat tracking on the site…and it has a dashboard widget.

  12. #12 jason says:

    i use dashboard constantly. powerbook g4 15″.

    i’ve got ical and ical events, gmail, google maps, yellowbook, clock, weather widgets for 3 cities, doppler radar, fox sports scores, itunes, and a backpack widget. occasionally i’ll grab the unit converter or dictionary. by far i use the backpack widget the most to interact with my notes and to-do’s and reminders and such..

  13. #13 Steve says:

    I rarely use Dashboard (too slow to load the first time, and because I forget it’s there), but one widget I find useful is this IP widget that shows your WAN IP address. Mine hasn’t changed in years, but it’s still nice to be able to see it quickly if you’re hosting a game that you want only your friends to connect to.

    I don’t know where the web site that the stock weather widget gets its data from, but it’s always totally wrong for my zip code. It’s 21° and snowing right now, but the widget says it’s 31° and cloudy.

    I keep 2 weather radar widgets up; DoppleViewer and US Doppler Radar.

    Other than that, Lorem Ipsum is useful when you need hunks of sample text.

  14. #14 Josh Pigford says:

    Haha, I’ve considered…unfortunately time doesn’t not make itself very plentiful to me :)

  15. #15 Davey says:

    I use Dashboard a lot, it’s one click away using my Mighty Mouse scroll ball.
    I use Currency Converter, Word ‘o the Day, Weather and World Clock to see what time it is in London, UK.

  16. #16 Dan Lurie says:

    The only three I keep open all the time are Weather, Calculon, and Keychain Assistant

  17. #17 Sean says:

    I started out with a lot of widgets, but I’m now using 2 widgets: Translation and pearLyrics. Love them both. For events and weather, I found that I wanted that info on my desktop. I replaced iCal Events with MenuCalendarClock, and the Weather widget with Meteorologist.

  18. #18 Steve says:

    I also wanted to add that another reason I rarely fire up Dashboard is because widgets waste CPU and memory when Dashboard is not visible, and some widgets use quite a bit. That’s pretty dopey. I wish Apple would add a pref to suspend widgets and purge them from VM when Dashboard is not visible.

  19. #19 Randy says:

    I use Radar In Motion regularly (daily?) to track the weather.

  20. #20 Rocco says:

    I hate Dashboard. I disabled it. It was more of a distraction than a real productivity tool. (might disable Safari soon too…!)

  21. #21 D says:

    Dashboard is a integral part of my productivity. I use Prodme, iClipLite, Calculator, Weather, Dictionary, yellowpages, 3 Countdown Calendars, iCal Events, Calendar, StatCounter, a feedburner stats widget to track subscriptions, and Stats for Adsense. Phew! I also pull many out from time to time when I need them. Dashboard was THE main reason I upgraded to Tiger.

    It is true that some dashboard widgets are naughty. However, I found that if I ran Activity Monitor with CPU cycle selected, then ran Dashboard, I could find the culprits and delete them. I don’t use any widgets that are pigs (well, FTP-beam soaks up cycles from time to time)

    ~=~
    http://thesplinteredmind.blogspot.com

  22. #22 Jason says:

    Are you being sarcastic?

  23. #23 hugh says:

    Agree with Steve and rocco. Used them ferociously to start with, now very rarely. Even though they are one click away on my mouse! Essentially they are just web pages, I prefer to use my browser.

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