Dashboard Widgets - Webclips
I’m well and truly up and running now. The slight hiccup at the start was a bit of a worry but I have not had a problem since. I’m still getting used to the way OSX works but have to tell you, I’m loving it.One of the OSX features I really like is the dashboard widgets. At the moment I have:
- Internet usage meter
- TV guide
- Gmail & Gcalendar
- Weather
- iTunes lyrics (displays lyrics of current song)
- System Meter
- PHP documentation
For those who don’t know, you hit F12 and you widgets appear in front of your running applications. There are many different widgets that you can download at http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ so I’m sure you’ll find just what your looking for there.
One of my favorite widgets is webclip. This is where you can create a live widget out of any web page or portion of a web page. Here the possibilities are endless. You could make one to watch an ebay item, to watch a stock price, to watch the music charts or anything else. Watch the video I posted that demonstrates how you can create a widget used watch a twitter blog on your dashboard. I’ll create a widget that watches my own Twitter blog at http://twitter.com/SebastianWindel (shameless plug…go ahead and follow me on Twitter).
I created the video right there on m mac using iMovie and it was super simple. I have never don any video editing before and it was very simple to quickly pick up. It uploads directly to youtube so that was perfect. I recorded the screen with a program called iShowU which was just as simple. I am loving the simplicity of the software that is made for Apple.
Next entry I will discuss how Google has just made it possible to use their Google widgets seamlessly with Apple Desktop Widgets….Stay tuned!
1 year ago