mac geekery

[egypturnash]

So I've been busy evaluating my old software environment, as I configure this new machine and re-assess all my customizations for OSX 10.4 "Tiger".

And I find myself looking at the "Deactivate Dashboard" checkbox in TinkerTool. I've randomly browsed the widgets available for Dashboard, and none of them feel like anything I need to run. It's just sitting there empty because I turned off all the default widgets, and the other ones that ship with OSX all seem just as useless to me. Most of them seem to be little interfaces to webpages, pretty single-site themed RSS headline viewers, or iTunes controllers. Does anyone actually have one that they swear by? One that's worked its way into your life and is just incredibly useful to have a quick press of f12 away?

I mean, I have little apps in place that give me some of the same functionality that the more useful widgets do, but they're hidden away in the corners of my normal screen so I can glance at them any time I like, not on a separate view that I only remember when I accidentally grey out the screen by hitting the Dashboard key...

Spotlight's not doing much for me either. I keep on wondering if it's wasting tons of space somewhere trying to index the contents of my AI source files. It doesn't have a hotkey any more because the default one kept interfering with my use of Illustrator, and I didn't feel like picking one.

Comments

[revar.livejournal.com]

The dashboard widgets I've ended up with after half a year, are, in order of how much I pay attention to them:

"Stocks", to watch my company's stock price fail to raise up to my buy-in price
"Radar In Motion", to watch weather radar
"Weather", to show a 5 day weather forecast for my area.
"RPN Calculator", because it's just useful to have a calculator.
"Air Traffic Control", to watch what WiFi access points are near.
"Marquee", to see what movies are playing locally.
"Stickies", for notes to myself.
"Package Tracker", to see where a fedex/UPS/DHL package I'm waiting for is.
"Calendar", to see the currently month's calendar.
"Countdown Calendar", to remind me how many days are left until an event.
"Capture", to take screenshots with, flexibly.

There's a few other minor things like countdown timers and stopwatches that I really didn't end up using, but which could be useful, and didn't take up much screen space. For web developers, there's various CSS and PHP cheatsheets for remembering useful stuff.

I also changed my dashboard key to Command-F12, so I couldn't hit it accidentally.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Mm. I'll poke at them. Having a few bits of handy CSS syntax one key away could come in handy...

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

Huh. So that's Reverse Polish Notation. (Just tried it out.) Rather weird and yet I find myself rapidly intrigued.

[orb2069.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to 10.4 until I find I have no other choice, to be honest.

Tried dinking with Konfabulator, for a while, and after experimenting with a ton of widgets, I wound up whittling them down to a meager few (processor speed, memory levels, WiFi sniffer.), then just turning it off.

I have, however, been having a lot of fun with CLIX - Which is one of those utilities that only a mac user would come up with. :)

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

The widgets I use almost daily are the ones for weather radar and forecast. Weekly I use the ones to show local movie showtimes (very useful) and for fun, I have one webcam widget for NYC as well as a Frogger sim. Are they AMAZING? No, but useful and don't take up real estate til I need them. As for spotlight, I use that all the time. ALL the time. unless I want to have my dock filled with aliases for documents, or to keep clicking about looking for docs, or have them on the desktop, this suits me fine.

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

Dictionary, translator, calculator, calendar, wi-fi status. The first three as just quick-and-dirty tools... the latter two because it's far easier to flick the mouse to the upper-left-hand corner to zip up the dashboard a moment than it is to check a month-block calendar and wifi meter with other apps.

I don't use spotlight except on rare occasions. Quicksilver, though? Ooooh yeah. Rocks my world.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hm. I just use the "airport status in menu bar" checkbox. And I have a replacement menu bar clock that drops down a month calendar when I click on it, and talks to iCal. Not that I schedule my life enough in advance to actually use iCal very much!

I switch between Quicksilver and Launchbar. LB is so much lighter and faster, but QS does stuff like take over iTunes hotkey control/track-change popups...

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

The advantage to the widget version of the wifi thingus is that it has numeric signal strengths, vendorIDs and encryption status -- all good things for doing realtime survey work when dealing with big groups of base stations (often happens in my job). :)

[protocat.livejournal.com]

I just fire up iStumbler when I want detailed stats, myself, since the situation rarely comes up. Can even manage Bluetooth and Bonjour, not that I've ever, ever used the latter.

[protocat.livejournal.com]

I find Dashboard completely worthless myself and after trying to find cute little widgets I realized I never used it and gutted it all, but Spotlight isn't something you want to try and cripple since some apps will depend upon it for searching. The best thing to do with Spotlight is to restrict it as much as you want from your various personal file directories you'll never want to search through. I personally use it as an app launcher and to quickly hunt down components when uninstalling crap and not really much else, however, I like it for the task I've given it and gave up using QuickSilver. As a direct result my dock is uber-minimal to just things I need quicker access to (by mouse or by hotkey to focus dock and arrow/enter nav), but really that's the diff between.. uh.. five seconds, I guess. But I'm impatient for my chat apps to launch!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hell, I just have Adium launch when I login.

I use either QS or Launchbar for app launching - I switched back to QS today because I like the way I can use it to keep all my album cover art in Clutter, and pull from it for tune-change notifications.

I know I need to leave Spotlight alive for stuff like Mail's searching. And many other apps's searching in the future, I suspect. And restricting it from certain directories is annoying, because the Finder's search by filename depends upon it. Grr. I have never really wanted to have this "find by content" thing on my own machine, not globally.

[protocat.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I barely ever need to search my computers and in the past I didn't mind waiting a minute for it to churn through everything before spitting out what I wanted. I think this was a case of needing to be first out the door to have this feature, since a few groups were all going for it at once (Actually, if I recall a few *nix developers had a find-as-you-type solution first, but it wasn't polished or intergrated into any desktop yet). In the future no one will even think about the resource usage since it'll be quite the non-issue. I think if I started serious usage of OS X prior to 10.4, I'd likely be using QuickSilver now out of habit over Spotlight.

And heee.. I used to have it auto-launch Adium, my MUCK client (Trebuchet) and IRC client (Mice iRC) but then I decided when I was doing some work writing StartupItem services and needed to debug/test/fix it all that I probably didn't want to be constantly hopping on and off networks and sometimes maybe I don't want a flood of IMs when I first start up a machine. Normally I try to keep the Mac on all the time, so it's not much of an issue to click a few dock icons after boot.

Reminds me, I should probably get around to writing a big long guide on how to completely re-impliment that single mouseclick for InternetSharing in SysPrefs as a StartupItem service to launch all the daemons and apps instead -- that you can actually change parameters on, since non-OS X Server can't really change much of anything from the GUI such as port forwarding. I was exceptionally bored when I did this.

[tilton.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I've turned off Dashboard too. There is not a single widget that I found compelling enough to use, and the darn thing was eating up my precious memory! Also, it always felt weird that there was this nebulous Other World floating around behind (or is that in front of?) my screen, unseen until I pressed F12.

As for Spotlight, I'm actually pretty fond of it. It doesn't do much unless you've taken the time to add Spotlight comments to a lot of your files. I use it to manage my collection of pornart! No, seriously, I wrote a full rant about how useful it can be (http://www.livejournal.com/users/tilton/210156.html) back in June. It's really great, but if you have a bunch of stuff, it takes a lot of work to add all the right tags to make it really worth while.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Judging from the transitions, I'd say that the Dashboard lives somewhere behind your head, and whips through it to land on the monitor when you want it. It feels like Dock magnification to me: looks good in a demo, not so useable in practice.

I don't think I'm willing to do that much work to make Spotlight useful. I suppose I'll play with it on and off, and maybe eventually I'll understand the Tao of Spotlight, but... I kinda keep my stuff sorted, and I try not to have so much stuff on my machine that things get lost!

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

I have Konfabulator and Dashboard running but for utterly trivial things that I find myself looking at very often - Konfabulator puts a plain-text CPU temperature readout in the bottom right corner of my screen (so I can see when a process is having a massive spaz), and Dashboard has Weather and "Sing that iTune" (grabs lyrics for the current iTunes track from a variety of search sites - PearLyrics does the same quicker, but doesn't let you edit and save the lyrics).

They're neat enough that I keep both running, but I think at the end of the day they were never meant to be more than an occasional diversion (else they'd be on the desktop all the time, right? :) And dashboard's pretty harmless as long as you've got enough RAM - that said, 10.4.0's weather widget leaked like crazy, which nearly had my reverting to OS 10.3 on principle :P

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

Some people have use for it, some don't. I've pretty much pared it down to:

1. iCal Events, good for knowing when to start preparing ahead for my weekly games and such. If you don't use iCal's events, it's not of much interest though.

2. GPeek, a Gmail widget that actually shows email subjects (lifted from Gmail's authentication-required RSS feeds). I prefer it to all those widgets that onlt show numbers of email, because I can just glance at it and decide if there's anything I actually want to read right now. Not as pretty as the ones that shows the number of emails as flowers in a pot or something, but more functionally useful for me.

3. Calculon, bare-boned calculator without any buttons. You just type numbers and math operators from the keyboards Not a fancy scientific calculator, but sufficient for my purpose, and quicker to acces for me personally than any other form of calculator I've played with. Of course, could do geeky Quicksilver stuff, I think there's a calculator plugin for that. I like the dedicated calculator mini-app better, though.

4. IP Widget, as simple as its name suggests. Displays any one IP you care to (your IP via Ethernet wireless, or the public-to-the-Internet IP) and copies to your copyboard upon clicking on it.

5. And, finally, the useless fluff: <href="http://www.dashboardwidgets.com/showcase/details.php?wid=1229">Discordian calendar. Wins the Most Likely To Get Deleted Once Wolfie Gets Bored Of It award. The most recent addition, really.

Everything with the exception of the Discordian calendar have basically been the most long-lived of the assorted crap I've tried putting onto my Dashboard. And there really are a lot of crap widgets, I'm completely sick of people flooding the widget sites with yet, yet more freaking one-site RSS feeds and one-image widgets and such.

The surviving items on my Dashboard have pretty much extremely low form factor and serve single useful and frequently referenced purposes that I'd probably be doing with bigger apps anyway. The Discordian calendar is the only one that breaks with this pattern, and thus the one most likely to disappear sometime.

I experimented with assorted notes-widgets but ended up just using the Notational Velocity application.

[sebkha.livejournal.com]

The Dictionary widget alone is worth the weight of Dashboard for me. I use that constantly, and only because it's so easy; otherwise, I'd probably just guess at spelling and be done with it. I have the Translator and Calculator set up as well, but they don't get the same amount of use.

I can usually find something via Spotlight faster than I could by hunting through Finder directories, so that one's a win too. I really helps once you start scribbling annotations on your image files. I usually jot down artist and species as I sort incoming images; that's usually enough to make everything findable later on.