10.4 Widget Site Opens Doors
sammykrupa writes "My new venture has just opened its doors. Dashboard Lineup is a site where developers can talk about the OS X Tiger widgets they are developing and and tips and tricks can be exchanged. There are also discussions about ideas for widgets. It's also worth mentioning that if you are a developer you can use the free hosting for widgets I have set up."
This "news item" sounds a bit like a thinly veiled advertisement for the submitter's site. Why no mention of the other Dashboard sites that have sprung up recently, like Dashboard Exchange and DashboardWidgets?
I tried Konfabulator, as did a number of people I know. For me I stopped using it because it was a hog, and just slowed down my machine too much. The lack of compelling/really useful widgets was a problem. A friend of mine summed it up with, "When the demo expired and I had to consider paying for it, I had already stopped using it, so I just deleted it." That was basically it for a lot of us. It just was not very useful. Dashboard looks to be more so. And it is free, so even if I only book a flight once a year, or look up a phone number in the yellow pages once a week, there is no reason not to have it.
It's really nice. I've been using multiple developer preview releases over the last few months (legally) and Dashboard certainly sticks out as being a very useful feature.
Press F12, they all appear, use them and hit F12 again and they're gone. Instantly. Stuff like:
- the iTunes controller.
- calculator (no more opening this app for just a quick calculation)
- the calendar view (simply seing the entire month is handy, since otherwise you had to go to the terminal, iCal or editing the time to see it, your iCal stuff also appear)
- Converter. Converting money from CAD to USD (in my case) is really convinient and faster than hitting a web site)
Overall, very nice feature. It's one of those things that makes it really hard to go back to panther after using Tiger for a little while.
IP Therefore I am.
And why no thinly veiled advertisement for Automator Sites? :)