When Mac OS X introduced the Dashboard, we were fascinated by the thousands of available widgets that display news, track stocks, watch the weather, find song lyrics, and so on. But eventually, you run out of words that must be translated to Dutch, and the Panda Cam gets old pretty fast.

Fortunately, your Dashboard can actually help you work, instead of just distracting you. You may have already checked out the Adobe Labs kuler widget, which features tons of user-submitted color palettes. I mentioned it in a post some time ago when it was pretty much one-of-a-kind. Today, there are many other color selection widgets, such Color Theory and ColorBurn. The former works in a manner very similar to Illustrator’s Live Color and helps you choose a color palette, while the latter delivers an inspirational new palette every day.

Color Theory by mudcube lets you choose a harmony type (split-complementary, for example) and build a color scheme.

Designers will appreciate the SeeSS widget by Guy D2, which serves as a great reference for a wide range of CSS properties. It’s a bit buggy but still very useful. I do hope we’ll see a revised version soon, as I like its simple interface. CSS Tweak is another nice widget. It allows you to upload a CSS file (just drag it to the widget) and completely optimize it.

CSS Tweak takes your CSS file and creates a new one stripped of all redundancies and excess, leaving you with an optimized file.

Freelancers will like the Authentic Jobs widget by Cameron Moll. It sends an alert when new design jobs are posted at the popular listing site authenticjobs.com, and it’s definitely the most design-job-specific widget available. If your searching for a wider range of jobs (okay, a much wider range of jobs) and don’t mind sifting through a bunch of sales positions, check out Monster’s widget, created by Colorworks.

If you click some of the above links, you’ll see that some of these spiffy widgets are located on the Apple site, but if you are a hardcore Dashboard user (or want to be), I encourage you to do some deeper searching, as there are lots of small time developers coming out with new widgets all the time. They don’t usually make it to the Apple site. Also, remember that in Leopard (Mac OS X), you can use Safari to clip part of a web page and make it a widget, so your favorite design blogs and other frequently-updated pieces can be waiting patiently for you in your Dashboard.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Design, RESOURCES, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.