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

[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.