Now Playing
Since we have a networked TiVo, I was interested in the Now Playing widget for Tiger's Dashboard. Unfortunately, I was never able to get it to work. So I was a bit surprised to see it listed in Forbes.com's list of The Best Mac Dashboard Widgets. Until I read why they picked it:
I don't have a TiVo, and so I wasn't able to test this widget myself, but if I did, I think I'd use it.That's how they determine 'The Best'? Boy, I can't wait to read Forbes' list of The Best Companies To Invest In: 'I don't have money or know what to do with it, but if I did, I'd pick this company.'
Oh, and if anyone can tell me why I can't get the widget to work, that'd be great. It just sits and spins while saying XML Downloaded. I'm not expecting you to answer, though, Forbes.
7/23/05 Update: I'm now using version 1.1 of the widget and it works great.
3 comments:
Not surprisingly, I've had that kind of trouble with quite a few widgets. So what's the update on your opinion of widgets? Have you found better use for them yet?
In a few days, MacWidgets, a sister site of MacThemes, is going to be releasing some really neat ones, so keep your eye on that page.
In some ways widgets are useful, like when I want to quickly look at the weather conditions, the current month's calendar, or make some simple calculations.
But some are more effort than they're worth. For example, the other night I read at orangecountychoppers.com that an employee's favorite movie is "The Hollywood Knights." Since I'd never heard of it, I figured I'd look it up at IMDb.com using the Dashboard widget. This involves invoking Dashboard (which is F7 on my machine) then hitting Command-= to open the Widget Bar, then mousing over to the arrow buttons to scroll through the Widget Bar, then clicking on the IMDb widget, then pasting the title in and hitting the return key. If you kept track, that's about six key-presses plus some mousing. Doing it the normal way (launch imdb.com in new tab and paste title into search box) is about the same amount of key presses, but no mousing. Plus the Dashboard way took a little longer because of the visual effects required to roll the widget bar up and slide the icons around.
If I had that widget open all the time, it would have saved a lot of mousing and clicking. Unfortunately, keeping Dashboard widgets open uses RAM (precious, precious RAM). Although the IMDb widget takes up less than 7MB of RAM, the Weather and Yahoo Traffic are using 81MB of Real Memory between the two of them. With only 640MB of built-in memory possible on my machine, 81+MB of RAM being held by occasionally-used widgets is a lot. So I can't afford to always have every widget open that I think I might want to use.
Oh but did I mention?
Jared is back in widget form.
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