Ooh Mac Dashboard Widgets

I guess that I’ve been upgrade to Mac OS 10.4 for more than a month now. However, I really haven’t had a lot of time to play around with it. Today, I discovered something really neat. I can add new tools to my Mac Dashboard! How I couldn’t have noticed this before, perplexes me but now that I’ve found the widgets I’m so excited! There are many useful and nifty widgets out there on the Apple Dashboard web page. Most of the widgets that interest me are for developers. For example, there are widgets that help you write PHP, CSS or HTML by providing reference info. There is a widget that gives you quick access to the W3C HTML and CSS validator as well as the Link Checker and a widget for access the terminal. There is a widget for TinyURL, one for blogging, one for uploading photos to Flickr, one for monitoring your Gmail account, and one for searching Technorati. If this isn’t enough to get you excited there is one that will access your Netflix queue, or send an SMS to anyone in the world. Gosh the list goes on and on.

There is some discussion out there in Macland as to weather or not the widgets are worth it or if they are simply a resource hog. Many of the things the widget do I have Firefox extensions or bookmarklets for. Still there is some stuff that I don’t have extension or widgets for. Plus, if I didn’t have a browser open all the time, the widgets would help me get to stuff more easily.

Uninstalling a widget is easy. Launch Dashboard, then click on the “X” in the lower left corner of your screen. Doing this will present the launch strip of widgets and new link “Manage Widgets”. Click on the “Manage Widgets” link and then click on the red circle icon with a line through it next to the widgets you want to remove. You can also uncheck the checkbox next the the widgets you want to remove. This will keep the widgets from loading in the Dashboard but leave them on you computer.
If you want to uninstall a widget and you can’t get Widget Manager to work, then you can always delete widgets manually by going to either /Library/Widgets (for those widgets installed for all system users) or /Users/yourAcctName/Library/Widgets (for those installed just for yourself). folder to the trash. There is also a piece of freeware called “Widget Manager” that will help you manage your widgets in the System Preferences.

If you want to disable the Dashboard, say you don’t trust yourself, your employees, or people using your public computers then there are several methods to do this described at http://www.paulstamatiou.com/2006/03/22/yamt-yet-another-mac-tip/. Check a few widgets out for yourself and see whether or not you think the Dashboard widgets are helpful.