Amnesty Widget Browser is a utility for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger that allows Dashboard widgets to live directly on your Desktop via a convenient icon in your system menu bar. Just select widgets from the Amnesty menu to open them and Control-Click (Right-Click) to close them.
Widgets loaded in Amnesty Widget Browser run completely independent of Apple’s Dashboard environment, maintain their own preferences and feature additional properties such as window depth and opacity.
For widgets junkies, Amnesty Widget Browser is a great way to try out third-party widgets without restarting Dashboard. And for widget developers, Amnesty Widget Browser makes a perfect rapid testing environment (instead of loading widgets in Safari).
Amnesty Widget Browser is slated for final release Q3 2005 but is available today as a public beta.
More info and download link here.
MacDailyNews Take: That didn’t take very long. Amnesty Widget Browser works. It’s cool. And it’s useful, too. Now you can see information from Widgets over top of other applications where you might want to have the Widgets’ information visible. You know, like flight info while you’re typing an email, etc.
Widgets are so much cooler than Spotlight. Esp for newbs like me (5 years and counting) to Mac. I do’nt have 20 years of crap on my HD, but playing with cool features like widgets and iChat AV make tiger appealing to the newbs.
I was waiting to see how long it took someone to bring this basic Konfabulator funnctionality — the choice of seeing widgets onscreen at all times — to Dashboard. Answer: Three days.
(Haven’t tried it — haven’t received Tiger yet)
Focker:
Dashboard cooler than Spotlight? Give yourself more time and you will truly appreciate spotlight. Perhaps you right tho, low end users I guess don’t really need it and are more into the effect stuff.
Apple beat them to it…it was built into the product from devel stages…read here for more info…
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050422172929402&query=Dashboard+debug
-or-
http://tinyurl.com/c68tp
Of all the Tiger features, Dashboard seems to be the one that is scoffed at the most for being useless. But I’m willing to bet that since the development for new widgets is wide open, there are going to be some brilliant ones coming down the pike that people aren’t going to want to live without.
This OS ROCKS. It’s actually better than I expected, and I can’t wait to see what Apple will come up with next. Exciting times to be a Mac owner!
MDN Magic Word: lived
I have lived the Windows nightmare, but I have seen the light.
> without restarting Dashboard.
Huh?
How about a program that sets the dashboard permently at the bottom of the screen and where you can load in dock items and also size the dashboard and items in it. I hate the dock because its wastes screen space at the edges.
– Mark