My Essential Mac Widgets
I don’t use widgets a great deal, but there are a few I find essential;
iStat Pro
A general system monitor with all the essential stats you will need for monitoring your system. It looks nice, you can tweak the colours and there is a handy link to the native Mac System Monitor.
Minutes
Minutes is a simple yet elegant timer. Drag the pointer around to increase the minutes and off you go. There are four simple themes and you can choose either the supplied sounds (which are very nice) or something from iTunes. Very “mac like”.
Organized
Organized shows you all your iCal data in a nice compact interface, along with any notes and ToDos from Mail. There are some world clocks as well if you need them. Yes, you can get all this in iCal, but its a lot quicker loading Organized.
Anything on the Web!
One thing I really love about widgets is the ability to take any section of the web and create a widget from it. I have my live bus stop times and my fantasy football league table in there; I am sure you will have your own favorites to add. Just find the page in Safari, hit the icon with the scissors in and select the part of the web page you need. Click add and you’re done. Neat huh?
Do I need widgets?
A lot of people don’t like the memory hit that running widgets all the time takes, but as its relatively cheap to max out your ram these days, they can be very handy for that information you need on hand at any time.
