The Forgotten Apple Dashboard

It’s strange that Apple doesn’t advertise this nifty feature of its operating system anymore. It is still very much integral to the working space of an apple machine and it still makes its presence on the keyboard. There’s even a whole section of the apple website dedicated to its ‘widgets’ http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ – there are 100s to downloads (admittedly some are not very good but many are brilliant). Located either as an overlay in your working environment or as a separate ‘desktop’ in OSX 10.7 the dashboard has a lot of useful features.

My Favourites

Stickies

This is one of the defaults that comes shipped with your machine. It functions better than the stickies application because it doesn’t clutter you working environment and it’s just as useful.

Clocks

Also a default widget, few realise that it can be useful to show world time zones. If you have family and friends in different parts of the world set up 3 different clocks that you can view with the click of a button.

Unit Converter

A default widget which saves you time when figuring out recipes (among other things).

Dictionary/Thesaurus

You could use spotlight to look up words but you can’t use it as a thesaurus. Put this widget on your dashboard and you’ll be able to.

Timer

Get it here

Download the timer widget so you don’t need to fumble for your phone anymore.

Currency Converter

Get it here

Convert currency quickly and efficiently. It is constantly updated to give you live results.

Make your life easier and try these out.