Filed under: Widget Watch

First introduced in Mac OS X Tiger in 2005, widgets changed the way people quickly accessed simple information on their Mac. And though Apple did not create the concept of a widget, it did present them in the best way.

With the press of a button I had access to my portfolio, my Yahoo! news, my local weather, calculators for everything, translators, you name it. Widgets were small, simple, and beautiful. They performed one function and did it exceedingly well. Widget ports created half of the first apps ported to the iPhone (think the Weather app, Calculator app, Clock app, and Stocks app).

So in honor of the widget being partially responsible for the origins of iPhone apps, I'd like to present you with my four favorite ones. I hope you'll list your favorite widgets in the comments section too.

When I recently wrote about hacking Apple's Weather Widget, a common question was: "Can you tell me how to change Apple's Weather widget to use Accuweather.com again?"

Now you might think this is just coming from some people who don't like any form of change, but several people said that the new weather widget simply did not work for them, showing no results or incorrect information for their location.

Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that no, I don't know how to hack Apple's weather widget to use Accuweather.com. I'm not even sure that it can be done.

The good news is that there is no real need to hack the Apple weather widget, because Accuweather.com provides their own widget which works really well, offering an animated weather map and a 15-day forecast (when expanded, 4 days when collapsed).This should come as good news to those who found that the new weather widget simply just did not work as well, but I would encourage you to check it out even if you like the Apple weather widget.

One minor usage note: I found that when I had expanded the widget I could not figure out how to make it collapse again. There are actually four separate views available which you toggle through by clicking on the "Accuweather.com" banner at the top of the widget (try it yourself and you'll see what I mean).

If you find that you get a blank section of the widget, which also happened to me, remember that command+R will always "refresh/reload" whatever widget you have selected.

iPhone users may be happy to know there is also an iPhone compatible page available.

Back in 2005, John Gruber wrote about Hacking Apple's Weather Widget to Show the Time of the Last Update.

I was disappointed to learn that my customized Weather widget no longer worked in Snow Leopard, and for some reason John's instructions no longer worked for the Snow Leopard version of the Weather Widget.

The culprit seemed to be the JavaScript that John had modified to calculate the time. Unfortunately I don't speak JavaScript, but with a little help from Google I was able to find a workaround which will enable this tip to work again.

Gravity Applications recently updated their Reminder widget, and I'm finding it quite useful. Now that my Dashboard isn't taking eons to load -- thanks to Snow Leopard -- it's really nice to be able to pop it up and with a few clicks set an iCal alarm for 5 minutes, an hour, a week, whatever I need a quick beep for that doesn't require a full event edit. It's simple, single-purpose and very effective.

You may know Gravity Apps from past coverage on TUAW, or for some of their innovative software projects such as Tags, Searchlight and SofaControl. These guys have been doing a great job providing software tools to meet a wide range of needs, and have proven to be eager and determined developers. The polish they push for on every application apparently shows up in their Dashboard widgets as well.

Ever wonder what files your Mac is hiding from you? Maybe not, but once in a while there's a need to peek at the stuff OS X keeps you from viewing. Finder does a nice job of hiding the "guts" of some folders, you see, but there are occasions (troubleshooting, setting up a web server, looking for some folders, etc.) when you'll need to view and/or edit these files or folders. Enter hiddenfiles, a simple and unobtrusive widget that'll show those hidden files and folders.

Sure, you can use Onyx or Terminal and do some command line work. But it's much easier to drop into Dashboard, hit "Show" on the blue button and have Finder relaunch, showing all invisible files. I had to click on Finder in the Dock to actually launch it again, but when I did there were those lovely .DS_Store files, staring me down. I use this to remove the hidden _files off my daughter's PC-friendly MP3 player. That way she doesn't have to scroll through resource-fork versions of her songs.

The widget is free and available from developer Matthew Hansen's page.

A new widget has found its way onto my Dashboard: QuickCal. It makes adding iCal events as easy as typing a natural-language string such as "lunch with Aditi at noon tomorrow." The widget parses the text as you type and shows what it finds below the entry area, letting you know if it understands your syntax. It also adds reminders automatically, based on your preferences for all events, events more than a week away, and events more than a month away.

QuickCal seems to need the subject (title) of the event to be at the beginning of the string. Anything following the "at" or "on" clause is usually discarded. Since we're talking about "natural" language, this usually works out fine. It's not QuickCal's fault, but the only drawback for me is that my Dashboard takes far too long to start up, so any Widget I use has to carry that extra baggage on first load. I stopped running Dashboard Kickstart recently in an effort to speed up my wake time, but I may go back to it.

I've also really enjoyed FlexCal, an app which provides a hotkey-triggered HUD for entering iCal events and todos. In my opinion, anything which keeps me from having to load iCal and deal with the multi-step process of entering a new event is worth the money. Of course, both QuickCal and FlexCal are free, so there's no room for complaint. Be sure to make a generous donation if you dig one, the other, or both.

Those wizards of widgets at iSlayer have come up with yet another really useful tool for the Dashboard. Organized is a free widget with an event calendar, world clock, notes, and to-dos, all of which are synced to iCal and Mail.

As with other iSlayer widgets like iStat menus/nano/pro, it is obvious that a lot of thought went into the design of the user interface for Organized. It packs a lot of data into a very small widget and even has a feature I immediately turned on -- the ability to shut off Marker Felt as the default font for Notes.

If you download, install, and use Organized, consider sending these guys a donation so they'll continue to develop great stuff for us.

It was bound to happen, and Matthew Raskin was the first (to my knowledge) to do it. That's right, Matthew whipped up a widget that counts down to iPhone 3G day: July 11th.

That's about all this widget does, but I'm sure lots of people are aching to know exactly how long they have to wait until they can get their hands on a new iPhone.

You may remember us talking about Minutes back when it was first released in April 2007. A lot has changed since then to make Minutes even better than what we first thought. If you're looking for a great dashboard widget timer that is just as Aqua-licious as the built-in timer for iPhone, then look no further than Minutes.

Since we first looked at Minutes, Nitram+Nunca has added:

• Removed Growl support in favor of their own unique system
  
• Changed beep for unique sounds
• Volume fading
• Plus many bug fixes

All in all, this is one of the nicest widget designs that I've seen in a while. When your timer is up, you get a small, nicely designed pop up dialog that you can click to stop the timer. You can download Minutes from the Nitram+Nunca website for free.

We know that several of our readers do the type of work that requires them to track their own billable hours. For those of you using Freshbooks, here's a handy Dashboard widget.

The Time Tracker Widget includes a timer (of course) plus menus to choose the project you're working on as well as the particular task (meeting, research, etc.). Finally, add any pertinent notes in the Notes field.

When you're finished working, click "Submit Hours" to upload your hours to your Freshbooks account. Easy! Note that you must have API access enabled in your Freshbook settings.

In February we covered Pingdom's release of a website badge and monitoring service that tracked the status of the Apple Store. A lot of our readers were resourceful enough to make their own widgets from the banner, but Pingdom has polished up and released a widget for everyone who looks forward to the excited anticipation of downtime hysteria.

The widget, and Pingdom's service in general, have the potential to be a blessing to Apple's servers. By pinging once and distributing the results to the masses, it could prevent thousands of simultaneous connections from refresh-happy Apple fans. Not that the servers haven't always handled the traffic with a fair amount of aplomb; it's just that much more breathing room.

Software releases (Safari 3.1 and a Security Update) marked this Tuesday, but without the bated-breath downtime we'd begun to expect. A little element of scheduling surprise, such as the 802.11n Airport Express release on Monday, makes this widget significantly more useful. So, grab the widget from Pingdom and enjoy future frenzies!

If you are addicted to Digg like we are, then the Digg.com widget from Hasan Alayli might be just right for you. This very simple Dashboard widget allows you to quickly browse the most dugg stories on Digg. On the creator's website, he says that it is developed using the Digg API and the AJAXSLT javascript library.

Digg.com widget is available as freeware from the creator's website or from the Dashboard widget section of Apple's website.

There are two good ways to control Time Machine; you can control it through the Dock and, as of 10.5.2, via the menu bar. Now you can control Time Machine through Dashboard. Time Machine Launcher is a dashboard widget that allows you to force a Time Machine backup, or disable/enable Time Machine on the fly. More control is always good! You can download this widget for free (donations are accepted) from the developers' website.

This Lifehacker comment thread made me go researching on what I might use for Webclips, but save for the front page of my favorite blog (TUAW, duh), I couldn't think of anything I'd really want to keep on my Dashboard 24/7. I did like the idea of putting Woot.com (and Shirt.woot, which I've been looking at a lot lately) on there, but as a few of the commenters say, webclipping (can I verb that?) the entire page makes things a little too big.

Fortunately, David Elliot piped up about the Woot.com widget, which easily and quickly lets you monitor the Woot sites from your dashboard, with a minimum of space taken up. And now I've got two instances of it running on my Dashboard, one for regular Woot and one for the Shirt version. I especially like that it includes Growl notification, too -- if I happen to be working around midnight and a really good deal pops up, I won't miss it.

Of course, you may not want to have something popping up on your Dashboard all the time tempting you to spend money. But if you're already following the Woot empire (and to tell the truth, I almost never buy anything-- I just like looking), the widget is an easy and simple way to stay up to date.

RadioSherpa has released an Apple Dashboard widget that streams radio stations from Boston, New York and San Francisco (they promise more are on the way), including several HD2 stations. It's pretty cool, and even displays the name of the current song in real-time before you load the stream.

Note that you've got to install the VLC web browser plug-in to get this to work, so keep that in mind.