Tech Talk: Mac Edition

Discovering Widgets

By Elizabeth Crane

Todd Carter and Elizabeth Crane share this column about computers. Todd focuses on PCs and Elizabeth writes about Macs. Because more people own PCs, Todd's column runs more often than Elizabeth's. Send PC-related questions to asja AT toddcarter.com, and send Mac-related questions to ecrane AT well.com.

It's a good thing my Mac tells me when it's time to upgrade my system, otherwise I'd probably still be running the version of the operating system that came installed with my G5 this past spring. 2005 is (almost) so last year. Even so, my Mac came with a Tiger in its tank (Tiger OSX version 10.4), and I've been upgrading it as directed every few months. This last upgrade, I discovered widgets.

The Dashboard that drives the widgets was there all along (it came with the system), but I hadn't done any exploring, so they remained untapped. Widgets, it turns out, are a fabulous little tool, a fun little time-waster, and an overall Good Thing for a writer.

What's a widget?

A widget, according to the Dictionary widget I keep on my Dashboard, is, in computing, “a component of a user interface that acts in a particular way.” So a Dashboard widget is a tiny application that performs a single function, like the dictionary I just mentioned. I get to choose which little apps I install on my Dashboard (there are hundreds), and then I can call up the widgets and use them. At the moment, I hit F12 on my keyboard or click the Dashboard icon in my toolbar and a host of colorful little applets pop to the surface of my screen. I can type a word into the dictionary/thesaurus, check the weather forecast, read today's baseball scores across the country (including games in progress), verify the date or time, use a calculator, catch up on my Calvin & Hobbes reading, and lose a quick game of Othello. To get back to my regularly scheduled work windows, I just click behind the floating widgets and they all disappear.

How widgets work

Tiger comes loaded with a standard set of widgets, including a stock ticker, sticky notes, and a phone book. Whenever you launch the Dashboard, you have the option to add or delete any widgets by selecting the + symbol at the bottom left of the screen. This pulls up whatever widgets you've loaded onto your system and allows you to select whichever you want from the menu and de-select any that are currently up. To add more widgets to your Dashboard, simply download them from the Apple website, then go into the + menu and select them for display. The number of widgets you have up at once is limited only by the size of your screen. And once they're up, you can flip them over (by clicking the little arrow on the bottom right of many widgets) and customize the color or display options, too.

Useful widgets

There are widgets that are meant to be functional and work-related and there are others that are, well, less so. Among the most useful to a writer are the dictionary and thesaurus I mentioned, plus a good many others.

* Translator widget: Type a word in Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese or Russian and get an English translation. Works in reverse, too.

* Word of the day: Who needs one of those tree-wasting day-to-day calendars? This one gives you a new word every 24 hours straight from dictionary.com.

* Hot off the press: New York Times headlines updated daily.

* Answers widget: For those times when you need a quick answer to a factual question, like “Who discovered the helical structure of DNA?” From answers.com.

Less than strictly useful widgets

Okay, I don't really need a Mt. St. Helens VolcanoCam in my Dashboard, but you can bet if I lived in Washington State I'd certainly consider it. Other delightful time-suckers include:

* Games: From crossword puzzles to solitaire to a game that replicates those fridge magnets you move around and make into poems, there's a game for every taste.

* Shopping: Track eBay auctions, compare prices across the country -- you can shop till you drop.

* Moon phase: Display the current phase of the moon. Exactly the kind of thing I need to have at my fingertips for no other reason than that it's cool.

* Krispy Kreme widget: Type in your zip code and get the location of the nearest Krispy Kreme Donut shop. Perfect if you're traveling. Coming soon: countdown timer for when the donuts come out of the fryer so you can get them hot (so I made that one up ... it could happen).

If there isn't a perfect widget for you, just wait. Developers are coming up with new ones all the time. Go to Apple's site at www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard and click on Just Added for the very latest in widget wonders.

Elizabeth Crane, aka the Mac Goddess, welcomes your questions and comments at ecrane@well.com.