Archive for the 'Widgets' Category

Hmm, that sounds like a good deal, if we’re talking about Mac apps designed to run on your Mac desktop/laptop. With most Mac shareware priced at (much) more than $10 a pop, it certainly sounds like a good deal.

But what about the iPod touch? iPod touch apps aren’t as fully-fledged as their desktop/laptop counterparts, so is the $20 that Apple is charging for an additional 5 apps still reasonable? Let’s take a look.

As everyone already knows, Football season is in full swing here in the United States, but keeping track of your favorite team whether it be pro or college has become a bit of a hassle. But since your a Mac user its no big deal. Let me introduce The Football Widget from Andreas Amann.

This widget is chock full of features and they are all presented in a very aesthetically pleasing manner. For starters, once the widget is installed it allows you to pick your favorite team and then places their helmet in the lower corner and proceeds to make all games with that team playing in bold. Aside from being pleasing to the eye, the Football widget also serves its purpose, and it does it well.

Whenever I’m expecting a package, I always get tired of loading various web sites just to check the status of my delivery. The Delivery Status widget by Mike Piontek is designed to solve this problem by doing all the work for you. The widget keeps the updated tracking information for any trackable package on your dashboard for easy access. All you have to do is fill out the information on the back of the widget (which includes an option as to how often you want updates) and the rest is taken care of for you (including Growl notifications). You can even open a second copy, allowing you to track multiple packages.

I’ve been horribly addicted to my RSS feeds and news feeds for years. As far as RSS readers are concerned, I’ve tried a lot of them - I’ve used NetNewsWire, NewsFire, Vienna and a bunch of other obscure ones that I can’t even remember. Most recently though, I’ve been using Google Reader, a web-based service.

Google Reader is a free RSS aggregator web app that integrates with your personalized iGoogle home page, and can be accessed from essentially any computer or phone with an internet connection and a web browser. This makes it pretty handy, though it can be annoying to have to open a browser window to check your feeds - it’s an obtrusive step away from the Mac desktop-app experience.

Has there ever been a time when you had a picture on your computer that you need to show someone when you were talking through IM, Twitter, or a forum? For these times, many people browse to ImageShack, find the file on their computer, hit upload, and wait for the image to upload. After they have done that, they have to find the right URL (which is usually the direct one), and paste it wherever it needs to go. As you may have noticed, that is a slow and painful process. Luckily, there is a new cool widget from Model Concept that makes this process much easier.

During Steve Jobs’s much-hyped demonstration of the iPhone, one of the features which people found most exciting was Visual Voicemail. According to Apple’s website,

An industry first, Visual Voicemail allows you to go directly to any of your messages without listening to the prior messages. So you can quickly select the messages that are most important to you.

It’s a neat idea and one which will probably push many people to consider the iPhone once it is available. But, what if, like me, you’re impatient? Well, you’re in luck, because you can have the same feature now, for free, thanks to CallWave.

Flickr is a goldmine of awesome photos from amateur photographers. Flickrator, from Davide Zanotti, gives the user quick and easy access to images hosted on Flickr.

Type in “quack” and you’ll see all the images tagged with quack. Type in “Mac Pro” and you’ll see all the lucky sods with Mac Pros. Once you click on a thumbnail, it displays the picture information, along with a larger thumbnail. The widget includes direct links to picture sizes, the author’s Flickr page, and more, giving tons of information quickly and easily. It’s actually quite fun to pop in tags and browse through images for inspiration.

Nike+ iPod? Why are you still talking about that? Hasn’t it been out for a year already?

Well, you are correct, this review comes smack on the Nike+ iPod’s birthday, May 23. The reason for my review is three-fold. First, it’s spring (at least in the northern hemisphere), it’s a great time to get into running, and I would recommend it to anyone. Second, I think after a year of on the road usage, it’s a good time to see how some people’s concerns about the system have turned out. Finally, I really believe right now we’re in the renaissance of this great product — the Nike web apps have matured, introducing excellent new features and very helpful Dashboard widgets. The wildly popular Nike+ iPod Sports kits can at last be easily found on store shelves. It’s a great time to be a runner and iPod Nano owner.

Dashboard widgets are great. Sometimes, I wish that I didn’t have to go all the way to the Dashboard to see one of my widgets. One way you could do this is run your widgets as a normal application. There are a few ways to get your widgets out of the Dashboard, but by far the easiest and most useful is Amnesty Singles from Mesa Dynamics.

Before I found out about Amnesty Singles, I ran widgets on my desktop using this tip from Mac OS X Hints. It allowed widgets to be brought to the desktop, but they were still a part of the Dashboard, and would sit above everything on the screen. Amnesty Singles, on the other hand, makes the widget a stand-alone application.

Most people have probably experienced iTunes not properly retrieving their album art. An easy (and free) solution to this problem is the great widget Amazon Album Art by Widget Foundry.

You simply select the track in iTunes, click the iTunes logo in the widget , choose the correct album art, and then click “Set as album art in iTunes.” In my experiences the widget does a great job selecting album art, but if it does not pick the correct art, clicking the logo in the upper right allows you to see thumbnails of all the matching album art. It is as simple as that to solve your iTunes album art woes.

“Where do you wanna eat?” “I don’t know, what do you want to eat?” “Sigh… Let’s just go to MacDonald’s again.” Has this happened to you? Don’t be a victim of eating out indecision, download The Iconfactory’s Dine-O-Matic widget and let fate decide where you will eat. Dine-O-Matic is a simple, free widget that hangs out in your Dashboard to help you make those difficult decisions. By randomly shuffling through your list of favorite places to eat, this widget can help you get out of a restaurant rut or even discover something new.

Who would have thought you could easily edit, spice up and export your photos from the comfort of your Dashboard? Who would have thought you could do it for free? Photo Drop, by Dropping Inc., is a free widget that lets you resize, crop, and add cool effects to your photos much more quickly than you might expect. Photo Drop is fun and easy to use and is an excellent alternative to waiting for Photoshop to load every time you accidentally quit between photo edits!

We have learned by now that Apple iPhone will sport a new unique feature called Visual Voice mail when it ships, hopefully in June 2007. But why wait until then, when we can enjoy it now on our desktop? Callwave Free Visual Voice Mail Widget is a dashboard application that allows you to see and hear your mobile phone mail messages, not in the order they were traditionally received, but in the order they are important to you.

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.

Yahoo has announced the availability of Yahoo Widgets 4, or as we affectionately call it: Konfabulator. Konfabulator was around back in 2002, long before Dashboard or Vista Gadgets. In fact, many argue that both of these widget platforms are direct copies of Konfabulator’s sleek design and implementation. The new version offers a glut of new features.