Widgets for Mac OS X Dashboard

Posted by Mary Rayme Dec 29, 2006

Recently I have become obsessed with widgets. What's a widget, you say? It is a small piece of software that is meant to dovetail into the Dashboard feature of the Macintosh OS X. They are easy to download and self-installing so they are pretty much idiot-proof.

Let me begin with the ever-popular cam. There is the Bocken Cam, which shows updates from Gavle, Sweden, where they burn the worlds largest Christmas goat every year. Who knew there was a Christmas goat?

There is the Greenwich Village Cam, which shows New York City from Christopher Street in the Village. There is the Lighthouse Cam, which shows views from the east coast, west coast, and the Great Lakes. The Old Faithful Cam shows you what's going on at the great geyser in Yellowstone National Park.

Missing that city traffic? You can download widgets for Traffic Cams in Cincinnati, Lisbon, Tennessee, Milwaukee, Paris, Ottawa and Seattle. Many places are using widgets to promote themselves. Illustrators, photographers, even colleges are promoting their work through widgets.

There are a lot of games as widgets also, but they seem cumbersome and slow compared to stand-alone games. I don't think serious gamers will go for widget games, but it's great for office goof-off time. C'mon, y'all know what I mean by office goof-off time. ;-)

My own personal favorite widgets: The Daily Doonesbury, Tremor Skimmer (a map with current earthquakes), and of course no dashboard is complete without a cute hula girl. (You can also alter hula girl to be a Jesus hula boy, something 9-year-old boys find very amusing.) Earlier I had some lovely, blinking Christmas lights decorating the border of my screen as a widget. Very tacky. Very fun.

And they must be fairly easy to write because there are new widgets added to the site on Apple everyday and hundreds of possibilities already await your downloading pleasure. There are also widgets available for PC or Mac through Yahoo. Yahoo has step-by-step instructions for how to write your own widget. But first, you need an idea. If you could have any widget what would you create?