The best little Widgets for your Mac

There are a lot of widgets out there, we all know that. I love widgets, but sometimes some of them are so big they don’t leave room for much else. For those like me who don’t want a third of their Dashboard taken up by one widget, I’ve compiled a list of the most useful little widgets.

First up, and yes this is one I’ve reviewed before, is Minutes. This is the best countdown/timer widget out there. A very intuitive interface and packed with features despite its small footprint. It has recently been updated, now allowing a simple noise to be played. You can select from any of the system sounds you have on your computer. This sits alongside other options like playing or stopping iTunes and launching specific files. Get Minutes here.

Next is Capture, a brilliantly compact widget alternative for taking screenshots. As someone who takes a lot of screenshots, it is often a bit of a hassle to keep Grab open all the time. Capture allows me all the same options and more, ever so simply. As this screenshot will show, Capture can be as simple or as fully featured as you like. You can do full-screen, specific windows, or a selection - all things you would expect. You can also however, take screenshots of the dashboard, save screenshots straight to the clipboard, change filetypes, save destination, scale and image quality. A nice addition would be to add timed capturing but it’s still a great tool in my books. Capture is available at Vanilla Soap and they have a whole bunch of other cool stuff, aside from a great collection of widgets.

iTunes stats is a widget that is for all you err… iTunes stats nerds. It shows nearly everything you could possibly want to know about your iTunes library. The screenshot shows them better than I can list them. Some stats are even clickable, switching between numbers of songs or a percentage figure. Currently I’m having a rendering problem with a couple of the stats as you can see, but hopefully this gets fixed sooner rather than later. Pick up iTunes stats over at Dashboard Widgets.

If you’re like me and you dabble in web design every now and then, it can be difficult to create a design if you don’t know what it will look like when you put content in. This is where the next little widget will come in handy. Dolor Sit Amet is a basic widget that will come up with as much of the famous “lorem ipsum” placeholder text as you tell it to. Specify a certain number of characters, words or paragraphs, copy it to the clipboard with a simple click, then paste it into your new design for testing. I could only find this widget available at the Apple Dashboard Widgets page. The developers page seems to be out of action.

The final widget I wanted to look at is iPhoto Mini. This little gem will display either a random photo or a photo of your choosing. You can browse through your albums, set any picture as your desktop background or open the image in a range of apps including Safari, Preview and Mail. iPhoto Mini can also use a custom application to open your photo so you can have full control over it. My favourite part about this widget is you don’t have to open iPhoto to use it! iPhoto Mini can be found at e dot studios.

That’s all for now, leave info about your favourite little widgets in the comments!