Circle Six on Widgets

This is a short list of our favorite OS X widgets. I try to keep the number of widgets running at any given time to a minimum, so this is, as I said, a short list.

CharacterPal from Taco Widgets is extremely handy.

CharacterPal is a widget that helps you remember how to type any special character. Just put your mouse over a character, and the key combo appears at the bottom. Now you don’t have to remember what Option + Shift + K does.

It can give you keyboard shortcuts, HTML entities and URL escape sequences, well organized and easy to read.

iStatPro from iSlayer is a big Widget with a small footprint. It gives me all kinds of information on everything from CPU and RAM usage to temperatures and fan speeds (latest Intel version). It’s pretty handy to have around, and you can control how much or how little information to show, what type of interface to show it in (horizontal, vertical, red, blue, classic, etc.), and it fits in just about any space on your dashboard.

For weather junkies, Radar in Motion is just plain fun to have around. You can have multiple maps, control the update frequency and they’re animated so you can see the direction of whatever front you’re tracking. And if you’re looking at the thumbnail, yes, I live in SouthEast Minnesota, and yes, we finally got some snow on January 12th.

Proportions by Paolo Grifantini is a handy tool for designers and anyone who deals with resizing things. You can enter 3 out of 4 parts of a proportion equation and the 4th is filled in for you automatically. Simple, yet nice to have around.

Image Shackle is pretty handy for quick image resizing. You can just pick up an image and hit F12, or however you prefer to open your Dashboard, drop it on the widget, set a size and hit “Shackle”. The image is resized, optionally converted to jpeg and saved with a new filename in the same directory.

SlothCam makes the list just for fun. It’s a webcam viewer that you can set to any of the default webcams or add your own. It can rotate between the cams or just sit and update one. I have mine permanently set to the cam outside of Fridays in Times Square. I like people watching.

Need your memory back? Stop Dashboard kills the running Dashboard process without taking away the ability to restart it. Just hit F12 or drag into your hot corner to start it up again. I usually use it before I start memory intensive operations like video rendering.

I use a few other widgets, but those are the ones that I feel are most relevant to this current series. There are, of course, a couple of handy Backpack widgets, a great Junior Mint widget for webmasters, and a ton of very useful widgets that I’m sure I’ll hear more about. Feel free to share your favorites!