10 Top Widgets for your Mac

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.