[poulh]

I am not a big user of dashboard. I have a weather link in my toolbar of safari and i can quickly get to the calculator using Spotlight... most of the other widgets seem like they are for fun distraction (which is fine!) than useful enougm eh that I would use thevery day. I don't even have the icon in my dock anymore.

So my question is, is Dashboard in its current version dead or are lots of people using it? Was/is this product just demo-ware to have an xtra feature to market Tiger?

I read this on ArsTechnica; it would be nice if I could have cocoa apps running in the dashboard layer, or have widgets embedded on the desktop (or in a layer above everything else, but not clickable alah Konfabulator).

Is Apple working on an update or is this something that will sit in my app folder like and eventually die like sherlock?

[Jerommeke]

I love to use it. For example, I frequently use it to check my appointments, as iCal Events lists the events in my iCal agenda's. Furthermore, it is a quick way to check how my machine is performing (miniStat) and check the TV guide to see what's on telly.

I can understand that the current widgets which are supplied by Apple are a bit of a disappointment, but there is so much usefulness out there!

[jmgriff]

My dashboard is turned off. Before I got Tiger I wasn't interested in dashboard, but once I had it I spent the first few weeks downloading different widgets, but never finding anything very useful (or at least, anything I couldn't do already by some other method). I mostly used it for the weather, but the BBC weather site provides better info and is only a click away. Besides, I only have 1.25GB ram, so I can do without the extra overhead.

[msuper69]

I use it all the time for the conversion widget. I iChat with a mate down under and it helps to convert US measurements to AU equivalents. I have the Mighty Mouse and it's very handy to press the scroll button, enter the data, copy the results to the clipboard, press the scroll button again and paste into the iChat text input box.

[saddino]

Originally Posted by poulh

I read this on ArsTechnica; it would be nice if I could have cocoa apps running in the dashboard layer, or have widgets embedded on the desktop (or in a layer above everything else, but not clickable alah Konfabulator).

You can have Dashboard widgets embedded inside the desktop and not clickable using Amnesty. It's shareware though.

Other Amnesty features:
- opacity
- scaling
- rotation
- multiple "virtual" widgets sets, hot-keyable

[GENERAL_SMILEY]

Surprisingly useful - I actually use it all the time now - thought it would be useless originally. TV guide, weather, traintimes, BBC radio player etc...

[JKT]

I use Dashboard almost every day for:

Weather widgets (from Apple and the BBC one - yes a website is a click away, but not for more than one location at any one time).

Stickies

Ambrosia's Easy Envelopes (one of the best widgets out there)

16 Webcams (one of my favourites as it lets me keep tabs on the beaches in North Devon, Dartmoor and also Hong Kong where I have family)

BBC Radio widget (much easier to use than the website or Real Player)

iCal Events

Clocks (for 4 different time zones)

Stock tracker

Calendar

and a few others. Some I use temporarily like the RadarInMotion widget and some games widgets if I am truly bored.

Personally, my biggest gripe with it is the time it takes for it to launch on the first occasion and also for things to load (largely due to the speed of my net connection though) subsequently.

Having multiple widget sets would be very useful so that I could swap in the games widgets when I wanted - something akin to Omniweb's Workspace feature - but I couldn't care if Apple were to allow widgets to be put on the desktop (needless CPU usage and I would never see them anyway as I tend to occupy the full screen with windows, whatever app I use). Quite obviously, for me, Dashboard is far from dead and I find many of the widgets you can get now to be very useful.

[sokukodo]

I keep mine turned off: I found that I rarely used them.

[Tesseract]

I find a couple of widgets useful, but some of the tasks that seem popular for widgets (map viewing, RSS feeds) I'd rather do in a Web browser or standalone app.

[rickey939]

I'm loving Dashboard...use it ALOT more than what I thought I would.

[Apfhex]

I use Dashboard many times daily for:
Weather
Stickies
Calendar
iCal events
Calculator (it's far nicer to push a button and get one than to even have the Calculator.app in my Dock)

[wataru]

The majority of Dashboard widgets out there are completely worthless, but I do use a few:
Calculator
World Clock
Stickies
quExp
Sing That iTune!
Wimic
Phone Book

[PDX Chris]

Originally Posted by JKT

Ambrosia's Easy Envelopes (one of the best widgets out there)

Holy CRAP, what a great widget! Thanks for posting about it!

[JKT]

Well, thank moki (Andrew Welch) and the other coders at Ambrosia, not me!

[RevEvs]

I use it a little. mainly for the converter

[kent m]

I enjoy the 'Oblique Strategies' widget. Aside from this one I don't use widgets. Though I have just discovered Amnesty...

[Weyland-Yutani]

I use it only for the weather widget. Never found anything else useful.

cheers

W-Y

[Randman]

Why do people use Amnesty when they can do it built-in?

[bells0]

Weather, easy access to play bbc radio 1 and webcams of time square and broadway to see how my favourite city away from home is doin!

[cmeisenzahl]

I like it but don't use it too often.

Completely depends on the widgets available.

Chris

[saddino]

Originally Posted by Randman

Why do people use Amnesty when they can do it built-in?

Because some people want widgets to be:
- able to run in Panther
- accessible in a system menu
- embedded in the desktop layer or with their documents (instead of always floating)
- "click-through"
- stored in multiple layouts that are hot-keyable
- semi-transparent
- scaled down or up from their original size
- rotated

Or do you know of some other "built-in" method to accomplish these things?

[Jerommeke]

Personally, my biggest gripe with it is the time it takes for it to launch on the first occasion and also for things to load (largely due to the speed of my net connection though) subsequently.

You might want to try DashboardStarter.

[JKT]

I appreciate the link, but this doesn't solve the issue of having it take a long(ish) time to load - it just makes it happen sooner after logging in. My log-in is long enough as it is (I have several start up items), so I don't really want to add to that unnecessarily. Cheers, though.