“My computer desktop is filled with widgets. And if yours isn’t, I’m betting it soon will be. Widgets — little self-contained programs that automatically open in a window whenever you want with updates and information like news headlines, weather reports and stock tickers — are sweeping the Net. They typically appear as little text boxes or colored little notepads on your desktop whenever you call them up,” Mike Wendland writes for The Detroit Free Press.
“Apple Computer’s new Tiger operating system is responsible for much of the current buzz because of a widget-spewing feature it introduced called Dashboard (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard), which runs as a sort of widget control center,” Wendland writes. “But widgets have been around for a couple of years and are also available for PC and Windows users through programs like Stardock’s DesktopX (http://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx) and Konfabulator (http://www.konfabulator.com), which comes in both Mac and Windows versions. So why do you want a widget? To save you time.”
“Dashboard comes standard with Mac’s Tiger operating system. Konfabulator costs $19.95. DesktopX costs $14.95 for the basic version. One caution: Because widgets are fully executable applications, there’s been some concern that hackers or malicious programmers could somehow exploit them to do harm to your machine. Indeed, Apple had to come up with a security fix last week for Tiger to close such potential vulnerabilities. To avoid such issues, download widgets only from reputable sources,” Wendland writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: For Mac OS X Tiger users (and Panther users with Amnesty Widget Browser), the free MacDailyNews Dashboard Widget version 1.1 is available here. The free MacDailyNews Konfabulator widget is available here and works in Konfabulator 2.0 (tested on Mac OS X 10.4.1).
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Amnesty Widget Browser for Mac OS X Tiger (and Panther!) allows Widgets to run free of Dashboard – May 19, 2005
Pixoria releases Konfabulator 2 for Mac OS X and Windows 2000, XP – May 19, 2005
Apple releases Mac OS X Tiger Update 10.4.1, fixes Dashboard widget auto-installation issue – May 16, 2005
Freeware ‘Widget, The World Watcher’ guards against ‘malicious’ Dashboard widgets – May 14, 2005
Widget Manager for Mac OS X allows you to inspect, remove, and disable Dashboard Widgets – May 10, 2005
Developer demos ‘exploit’ in Mac OS X Tiger’s Dashboard – May 09, 2005
MacDailyNews Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X Tiger released – May 07, 2005
The MDN widget is cool, then again so is the site. Thanks guys.
What’s nice about the MacDailyNews Dashboard Widget is that it’s simple, clean, and it just works – like a Mac!
Thank you MDN that’s cool indeed, for my show on PC users ..
I wish many of the widgets didn’t take up so much memory. Check out your Activity Monitor and see how much real memory (not virtual memory) some of these things take up. Some of them are real memory hogs. Some of them are significant CPU hogs while doing nothing. For laptop users, this is more significant.
Many though, are downright handy!
Thurrott doesn’t get the point of widgets. you can tell he doesn’t get the point. The point is that these are little applets.. they DO NOT produce any kind of output file, per se, which is what applications typically do. The output is ‘soft’ the information on the screen. maybe the output is just playing a little game of pong in dashboard. The point is there is no saving of any file.
having said that, dashboard is perfect for little tasks that only take a second.. looking up a thesaurus.. a phone number, checking on the stocks…then you get rid of the widget through the dashboard interface….
one of the cool things about dashboard is it makes Tiger more and more compelling with each new widget released…
there’s a Canada411 widget that lets you look up anyone ANYONE in canada and get their phone number and address.. wow!
Let’s see here is a selection of popular widgets and their memory profile. The second to last number is the real memory. The last one is virtual memory. Funny how there are 5 widgets that use more memory than the FINDER. Over a 100MB is used for the widgets displayed in the table below. For some quick checking of info (no matter how cool), nearly 20MB for a little application is a great deal.
If their memory profiles shrunk to something like the phone book one, I’d be more excited in having more run. But most the ones below I do turn off.
1821 Stocks DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.00421.42 MB154.09 MB
1827 Unit Converter DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.00319.32 MB162.51 MB
1823 TV Tracker DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.00318.53 MB154.24 MB
1822 World Clock DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.00318.24 MB153.91 MB
1820 Package Tracker DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.00317.39 MB151.95 MB
315 FinderiLoveMDN0.00511.62 MB240.06 MB
1791 mdimportiLoveMDN0.00410.48 MB74.01 MB
312 DockiLoveMDN0.0027.42 MB167.98 MB
649 Weather DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.0046.80 MB165.78 MB
652 YahooTraffic DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.0046.18 MB163.21 MB
647 Phone Book DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.0034.71 MB163.95 MB
650 Calendar DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.0034.27 MB153.20 MB
651 Calculator DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.0032.30 MB151.89 MB
648 Dictionary DashboardClientiLoveMDN0.0032.14 MB159.52 MB
“To avoid such issues, download widgets only from reputable sources”
In an ideal world, this would avoid risks, yes, but as we see in the MS world, ill-intending people are perfectly capable of acting and looking like reputable sources, tricking users into infecting their own machines. (Along with handing phishers their credit card numbers and that sort of thing.)
Is this a security risk or is it not? One of the main reasons I (also) use Macs is the security thing. If that goes out the window, Mac loses a big part of its attraction to me.
Hybrid. Even if they did start writing malicious widgets, hackers can only hurt Macs ONE AT A TIME.
OSX has been out for what, 5 years now. Er.. any viruses to report? ANY? Ok. Now security is a big part of the Mac attraction only because next to the piece of crap Micros**t ‘XP’ Apple’s OS is locked down pretty tight.
And even IF we started getting viruses OSX would still be a better OS.
I know, I use both. XP is a vile mish mash of clumsy windows and tiny ugly icons. Revolting. I like to come home and slowly run my pointer along the dock to remind myself how well thought out icons should look.
An example of XP design: You open the CD Burning ‘Wizard’ (stupid name) and as you attempt to type in the name for the CD you find that the field is about 5 spaces too short to show the whole name, which is limits you to naming it something cryptic like 5-22-05BldgsVsRngrs.
And this from a company with *Billions* of dollars in resources.
One more thing: MDN rocks.