On Mac OS X the ‘wow’ and ‘gee whiz’ factor of Widgets/Dashboard make part of the sale…. sorta like cupholders or a slot to hold your sunglasses in a new car. Widgets look really cool, the transition from the desktop to the Dashboard seems 21st Century, but, after using OS X for a while, Widgets kinda fall into the background and get forgotten. Recently, though, I’ve noticed my Dashboard and Widgets get used quite a bit. Here’s the set-up, explanation follows.
1. Date Calculat0r by Bright Light Software. You can calculate the days between two dates, add dates to a particular date, or count backwards. Great for scheduling orders and discovery cut-off dates.
2. Easy Envelopes by Ambrosia. Previously covered here, great little envelope application that hooks into Address Book.
3. Clock. Built into OS X but duplicated four times, to cover the time zones. Handy to have when trying to schedule a phone conference with someone in a different time zone. Clocks arranged East to West coast and local time popped to the side a bit for highlighting purposes.
4. Quickcal by “Smelly. Puppy.” This widget allows you to enter natural language events and todos on your calendar. Awful handy when combined with the Clock set-up above. Simply type “Phone Conference with Super Expert Next Tuesday at 11:00 a.m.” hit return and it adds it onto iCal. (Donations encouraged. Easy Envelopes and Date Calculator are used as lead in freebies to attract you to the company’s other products. Quickcal is a solo project and a little PayPal could go a long way).
Well, that’s it. If you have a favorite widget or widget workflow not shown here, brag about it in the comments!
 highlights: ToDos in your notebooks can be made to sync with iCal; the ‘MultiDex’ a supercharged index that automatically updates every word in your notebook and includes several useful stand alone categories such as ‘To Do Items,’ ‘Keywords,’ and ‘Due Dates;’ and, of course, the awesome outlining features which let you sort outlines by date, alphabetically, by priority etc. At only $24.95 it’s worth picking up just to have around.