Geeking Out on Widgets

Widgets can definitely get out of control and annoying, and there are a lot of useless ones out there, but these are the ones I found useful and functional.

1. I used Dash Blog to post this entry, which is a very elegant interface for posting blog entries from a widget.

2. DashLicious is a widget for posting bookmarks to your del.icio.us account. When you are browsing a particular page in Safari, whatever address is in the url menu at the moment that you launch dashboard and the DashLicious widget, that will be the url you post onto del.icio.us

3. Here is the link that describes instructions for changing the configuration in the Phone Book widget to querying Google Maps for directions as opposed to Map Quest which has gotten me lost way too many times and doesn't even have satellite mapping.

I also found a link that shows how to edit a piece of code in the phonebook.js file in the widget folder in the library that will change the map query in the Phone Book widget to Google Maps instead of Mapquest, which has gotten me lost way too many times by providing back directions. Link here

There are already 51 widgets and this os just came out the DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY. I can only anticipate how many more are being developed as we speak. It will be interesting to see how sophisticated they get. I am waiting for a useful Flickr widget.