Freeware ‘Widget, The World Watcher’ guards against ‘malicious’ Dashboard widgets

Widget, The World Watcher 1.0, by developer Zack Schilling, is not only a campy, eco-cartoon from the early 90s, but also a little utility that allows you to keep Safari’s automatic file opening enabled without worrying about “evil” widgets installing themselves.

If a widget is being installed, a dialog will pop up asking if you wanted to install it. You’ll have the options of allowing the installation, deleting the widget, or having it dropped on your desktop for later.

Widget, The World Watcher 1.0 is free (44k). More info and download link here.

MacDailyNews Note: We should be seeing similar functionality built into Mac OS X 10.4.1 due at any moment from Apple.

The MacDailyNews Dashboard Widget—which grabs the latest news, information and reviews from the MacDailyNews RSS feed— in its first week, has been downloaded 6,057 times from DashboardWidgets.com and no telling how many times from Apple.com’s Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets Downloads page. Thanks to everyone who has downloaded it. If you haven’t grabbed it yet, now’s your chance!

Related MacDailyNews articles:
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

9 Comments

  1. If you haven’t donwloaded the MDN widget don’t bother. It’s absolutelty the worst widget I’ve seen thus far. I posted this information earlier and MDN removed the comment and blocked my IP. What’s up with that MDN? Your now censoring your website to only show postive posts? That’s a nice way to treat your readers.

  2. It’s interesting that security problems are addressed before incidences of attack, which is refreshing. And yes, the MDN widget could use some modification, like the ability to read and write posts thru it!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.