10 Top Widgets for your Mac

A list of useful widgets for your Mac, originally posted in 2009 so no longer useful for modern osX

There’s literally thousands of widgets available for your Mac, but before you know it you’ll have cluttered up yet another part of your Mac with things you don’t really need and very rarely use. So which ones are actually useful and worth the download? Here’s 10, in no particular order, that I use.

iCal Events: Keep track of your upcoming events at-a-glance. You can also specify which calendars to include.

iCal Events Widget

Currency Converter: Add as many currencies as you like – type in the amount you’d like to convert and see the exchange rate in all of your chosen currencies.

Currency Converter Widget

Happy Birthdays: Takes data from iCal and displays days remaining, date of birth and age at next birthday. No more excuses for those forgotten birthdays now!

Birthdays Widget for Mac

iStat Nano: A system monitor that tracks all kinds of useful information such as processes, battery, machine temperature, fans. Very useful for all those techy details you need to know at-a-glance.

Stats Widget for Mac

Montastic: Keeps track of your websites to make sure they’re all live with no downtime.

Site Uptime Widget for Mac

Word Counter: Not only counts the amount of words but also characters and instances of text. You can copy-paste into the text field or type away.

Word Counter Widget for Mac

Designers Toolbox: Some useful conversion tools including paper sizes, HTML unicode characters, website font sizes, upload/download time for specific file sizes and connection speeds.

Designers Toolbox widget for Mac

Countdown: Specify a future time and date and this widget will countdown the days, hours, minutes and seconds until that event. Useful for things like holidays or meetings

Event Countdown Widget for Mac

Corporate Ipsum: When you’re at the design stage of your project it’s unlikely the client will have the correct, if any, copy for their site. Use this Lorem Ipsum creator to generate some random text.

Dummy Text Widget for Mac

CharacterPal: If you regularly use special characters i.e. those ones that aren’t shown on your keyboard then this is an absolute must. Hover over a character to see what key combination you have to type.

Special Characters Widget for Mac

3 replies on “10 Top Widgets for your Mac

  1. Avatar for iangarstang iangarstang says:

    Great collection, I also find Screenshot Plus and Dash Notes pretty invaluable

  2. Avatar for Max Max says:

    Thanks mate! Nice list! I would like to mention organized, witch has wordclocks, notes, events and a calendar, soo nice 🙂

    1. Avatar for alan alan says:

      Thanks Max – that certainly is another great widget that incorporates a number of the Apple widgets into a nice compact format. The link is http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/business/organized.html

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