In this hebdomad ’s Dashboard roundup , I cut across way to take reward of a extra feature of newer PowerBooks ; tail your favorite college football game team ; get information about Terminal commands ; and get a useful pixel ruler on your sieve . I also pick a cosmopolitan class of widgets for my “ Why ” of the workweek .
Carpenters Level(free ) . I have a confession to make : I have absolutelynoidea if this widget work on ( which is why I have n’t given it a rating ) . But theideabehind it is so geeky - cool that I had to include it in this calendar week ’s column . agree to the developer , it use theSudden Motion Sensorin the latest PowerBooks — but not iBooks , due to a difference in the means the sensors work on — to turn your laptop into one of the most expensive levels the world has ever seen . alas , my PowerBook is of the old generation , so I have no way to try out Carpenters Level . But I encourage readers lucky enough to have the newest ironware to give it a try , if only so they can ask their Windows - laptop - using Friend , “ Yeah , well can your laptop computer be used to pay heed a picture straight ? ”
league Call 1.0 (; free ) . I ’m a big rooter of college football game , but now that I no longer live anywhere near the city where I went to college , I have to follow my squad via the Web and SportsCenter . ( I also no longer have my team ’s schedule memorize , as I did when I was a student . ) So Conference Call is perfect for me : After choosing my league and team ( sorry , minor schools — only D1 programs are available ) , Conference Call show me the intact season schedule : dates , time , house or aside . It even show the score of those game that have been playact ( green lines for wins , red-faced lines for losses — I’m hoping for a plenty of commons this year ) and the team ’s current disk . Clicking the “ More item on the WWW ” link open your web browser to your squad ’s Sir Frederick Handley Page on the Fox Sports Web land site ; to view a similar pageboy for an opponent , dawn the squad ’s name in the docket . ( dawn the “ Refresh data ” connectedness to verify you have the latest docket and scores . ) you could collapse the contrivance so that it get less space by click the football icon . Now that the baseball time of year is over for my squad ( and my wife ’s ) , Conference Call has take the place of Scoreboard on my Dashboard . Note : According to DashboardWidgets.com , Conference Call is presently under review ; hopefully it will be available again soon .
- NIX manual of arms (; barren ) . If you use Terminal — or any other Unix racing shell — oftentimes , you ’re intimate with the
Super Rule (; free ) . Are you a Web designer who ’s rummy how your creations will look in different size of it of web web browser windows ? Or curious how small you need an image to be to fit in a finical distance ? Super Rule provides a translucent overlay , arrant with pixel mensuration markings , that can be resized at will — the current overlayer size is noted in the bottom - right hand corner . Since both Dashboard and Super Rule are semitransparent , you may see decent through them to watch the browser app window , image , or any other object underneath . I wish the developer ’s name did n’t obscure so much of the overlay , and it would be great if you could quickly resize the overlay to mutual display size , but it ’s still a useful widget for those pertain with size and spacing .
Widget “ Why ? ” of the calendar week
Each week , I give a safe - natured poke at a contraption that make me think , “ Why was this necessary ? ” This hebdomad ’s “ why ” goes not to a individual gismo , but to an entire mathematical group of widgets : iChat status widgets . If you browseApple ’s thingamabob areaor a quality gimmick situation such asDashboard Widgets , you ’ll obtain a passel of these supposedly helpful widgets which simply say you — in one of a bit of different ways — which of your iChat Buddies is currently signed on .
Now , this would be a very cool estimation , except for one thing : iChat already provides such functionality and more via its Buddy List . I have yet to find a widget that leave more functionality than the Buddy List itself , nor one that is comfortable to read or provides as much information . And thanks to Exposé ’s “ All windowpane ” mode , it ’s just as quick and well-situated to regard your Buddy List as it is to enable Dashboard and view one of these widgets . ( I say you could choose not to display iChat ’s Buddy List and then use one of these widgets as your master way to interact with iChat , but I guess I just do n’t get the advantage . If one of our readers can enlighten me , please do . )
