The features in MacOS X aren’t too bad, and as for the whinefeast regarding the dock, I see nothing wrong – what goes wrong is when people go into the dock preferences and start activing every damn thing in there, the magnified effect, making the dock transparent to the max etc.Īlot of the effects, which hog processors, are normally disabled – KDE actually ASKS you whether you want the effects to be lite, medium or heavy, Windows XP adjusts according to your system effects and Mac OS X disables effects not supported by the graphics card if people do whine about the over use of affects and the adverse affect on their computers performance, given how the operating systems operate, they only have themselves to blame for setting up their system in that way. Well, that is what I think Bytecoder was trying to get at in the way of eye candy – its about weighing up the benefits of adding the eye candy, whether the end user actually needs that particular feature and whether the downsides are outweighed by the benefits.

As long as the use of it doesn’t hinder workflow such as being a memory hog or visually intrusive.

This inspirational compilation post showcases a collection of 32 creative, unique and easy to use Apple Macintosh Dashboard Widgets, including a selection of default widgets that ship with your Apple Mac, and a good handful or two of third party widgets.As for Bytecoder’s comment on eye candy there’s nothing wrong with improving the look of a desktop no matter if you use KDE, Gnome or something else. They are developed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, meaning everything that is possible on the web, is possible in a dashboard widget, making it relatively easy to achieve a great looking and easy to use widget.

Dashboard widgets are actually relatively easy to make, and most web designers/developers can produce them without much difficulty.

Other than a widgets purpose, its user interface is the most important aspect it makes the widget look good and (hopefully) makes it easy to use, making it compelling and user friendly, which is what all application developers should be aiming to achieve. There are various ways an application (or more specifically, a widget) can be presented to its users some bad, some good and some tremendously well.

Dashboard widgets mac ripples