Of course it’s with Google and it is hard not to trust in them after all they do to honor your privacy. Another such attempt by Google is the new Google Dashboard that makes you feel a little bit safer about keeping the majority of your virtual life on their servers.

Here’s what Google Dashboard is all about:

The Google Dashboard gives you quick access to all kinds of information that Google knows about you. Accessible here, it requires you to re enter your password even if you are logged into your Google Account, because the Dashboard contains all kinds of information about you. Once you log in, a summary of the services you use and what Google knows about you through those services is presented.

The Dashboard tracks a number of Google Offerings including your profile data, web history, Gmail, Docs, Talk, Reader, Orkut, Calendar, Picasa, Youtube, Blogger, iGoogle, Contacts, Friend Connect, Voice, Custom Search engines, Mobile Sync, Health, Alerts and Tasks.

Other offerings like Analytics, App Engine, Bookmarks, Groups, Sites, Notebook, Page Creator, Webmaster tools and the latest addition Google Wave are not yet included in Google Dashboard.

Dashboard lets you know which data is private – that is visible to only you (and Google) and which is public – meaning you, your contacts or anyone can see those details (depending upon the context). Such shared and public items are marked with an icon and details are presented wherever applicable.

In addition to personal information, Dashboard also provides quick access to settings for any particular service you use. So you can easily change or share/unshare information from the Dashboard. Alongside are listed the various privacy policies of each letting you know how your personal information is stored and used.

The Google Dashboard is not the first effort from Google’s side to give you greater control over your personal information and data. There is also an Ads preference manager that addresses similar issues as well. To add on to that, Google has a special Data Liberation Front, a team that caters to, vaguely similar if not exactly, the same issues.

It is all about making it easy for users to switch. As an example you may love Google Docs right now, let’s say you don’t like it two years on, but you have a number of documents that are now sitting on Google’s servers. Ideally you should not be tied down into using Google docs just because you have your data on there. So Google Docs also offers an export as zip feature, that lets you export all your documents in one go.

Google is certainly leading the efforts in empowering users with an ability to have a greater say as to who can view their information and data and what can be done with it. Purists may find that it is a little too less a little too late and that Google can easily hide what they don’t want you to see. That they are giving you glasses to look through, but what if the glasses only show the brighter picture?

It would be interesting to know what you think of the issue. No doubt Google makes great products that makes us use them, but are we putting too much information about ourselves in their hands? Let us know your thoughts.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Zooloo consists of the following components that you can use to design your own portal website for free:

• zSocial: Social networking with Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter with single status update across all networks
• Dashboard: Personalized dashboard for news, photos, events, email, etc.
• Site Creator: Website and blog builder with themes and widgets
• Privacy Manager: Control who sees which parts of your website
• Photos/Videos: Online photo organizer and video library
• Calendar: Calendar, address book, reminders and to-do lists
• Entertainment & Shopping: Customized online entertainment for music, movies, etc. and favorite shopping sites

Homepage with Social Networking

The homepage has a search box at the top, zStatus and zSocial on the main page, and widgets on the right to upload photos, access email, calendar and your blog.

zStatus is a status update box from where you can update your status across Zooloo, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Below that is zSocial, where you can interact with these social networks. Clicking the tab each network shows relevant sub-headings: for example, Facebook lets you choose between News Feed, Status Updates, Photos, Wall & Friends.

You can choose the background of your home page from several themes.

Your Dashboard

You pick and choose widgets to create your personalized dashboard. The dashboard is organized with tabs at the top, so you can create multiple tabs for different areas of interest. Clicking Add Widgets opens up a gallery of widgets that you can drag and drop to any tab on your dashboard. Widgets that need access to your login or profile need to be customized from the Options button on that widget.

The widget gallery is quite impressive – some of the popular types include:

• Social Tools – Email, Social Networks, Photo-sharing, etc.
• News Feeds – CNN, New York Times, etc.
• Entertainment – Last.fm, iTunes Media

You can see the list of widgets available in Zooloo here. From within your dashboard, you can listen to podcasts and watch videos without leaving your site. You can rearrange widgets with drag and drop and customize the theme. Your dashboard is private, so nobody else sees it at any time.

Build Your Zooloo Website

With a free Zooloo account, you get a yourname.zooloo.com website for free. Your website includes profile, photo, video, graffiti, blog, and three custom pages. With a $30 annual subscription for Zooloo Plus, you can use it with your own domain name and some extras.

The zCreator website builder is very easy to use. You can choose from different layouts and themes for your website. You add content placeholders by drag and drop and fill them with the text and images to build your website.

Each page of your website is private by default. You can choose to share individual pages, photo albums, and videos publicly, or with specific friends on Zooloo. The privacy settings are easy to use and offer granular control over who sees what on your website.

Blogging and Graffiti

Zooloo also offers a simple interface to add a blog to your website. The blogging service supports categories, comments, and photos/videos. You can also import your blog from Blogger.

Graffiti is Zooloo’s social bookmarking or clipping service. Using a bookmarklet from any browser, you can quickly clip a link, photo, or video on your Graffiti page. Graffiti posts also have comments so you can comment on your friends Graffiti items.

More About Zooloo

Zooloo is an easy-to-use, attractive option for non-geeks to have their own website and a central place for social networking and infotainment. The owners of the site say that they are not competing with established social networks like Facebook, but complementing them. There are already over 20,000 users of Zooloo from each state in the US and 76 countries. Users are buying from within their shopping malls inside Zooloo using PayPal. There are plans for an iPhone application as well.

Will you try out Zooloo or recommend it to someone? Do you prefer any other free website/dashboard service? Let us know in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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However, after finishing the previous article on How To Place Your Widgets On The Desktop, I had a thought about Widget games and lured myself into searching and downloading a bunch of them.

Here is the short list of what I found among the hundreds (or thousands) widget games available out there.

1. SudokuWidget

In this variation of the classic number puzzle game, you’ll have random puzzles with four different levels of difficulty. You also have the option to reveal an incorrect answer, use “pencil” marks for temporary numbers, time the games so you can see how much better (or worse) you are getting, show high scores, use blank puzzles and many more. All I can say is, spare a big chunk of your time to enjoy this one.

2. Mars Explorer

At first, I thought that this one was not a Dashboard game. Widgets, to me, are simple mini-applications with a certain function. But the size and the complexity of Mars Explorer go beyond that.

The description of the game goes like this: Ascend massive volcanoes, race atop elevated plateaus, splash through lava seas, and execute aerobatic stunts using deployable wings while playing laser tag with your friends over the internet!

What more can you ask?

3. Treshold

This one is a multi-dimensional maze program. A classic puzzle with increasing levels of difficulty: once you have mastered the two-dimensional mazes you may progress to three-dimensional mazes and so on, up to six dimensions.

Six dimension? At the time of writing, I can’t even get pass three dimension.

4. Space Fighters and Asteroids

For those who love spaceship adventures, why not try these two widgets? Both are variations of the classic “Asteroids” game. Just remember not to destroy your keyboard.

5. Bubble Bazinga

Your job is simple: group bubbles with similar colors together and get a score as high as you can. But don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the rule, this one is very, very addictive.

6. Chrysalis-B

Want to know how good you are in creating a new world? Maybe you’ll get a clue by playing this widget game.

Chrysalis-B is a real-time causal pace evolution widget/game. You start with nothing but plants and dirt within a glass chamber. By figuring out the right temperature that promotes growth/evolution, you must guide an unknown species through several stages of evolution until it hopefully evolve into the Elders.

7.What’s Different

Do you have a good eye? Try to spot the differences between the two cartoon images. This game reminds me of my kindegarten years. Yet, doing it again now still feels fun.

8. 3D Crashdrive

If you love to drive like crazy, get crazy with this one. The goal of 3D Crashdrive is simple: have fun. It is a freeroam race/stunt game. You can play around on your own, but better yet: you can also play it in multiplayer mode. You can play together with friends or random players from all around the world and compare your records and score.

9. Missile Command

A remake of the classic arcade game. I played this back in the 80’s on the big machine with a large ball to control the anti-missile circle. This game is also featured in one of the episodes of Chuck. Even though much smaller in size, this widget version isn’t any easier than the original version. At least, not to me.

10. Crate mania

There are many first-person shooter multiplayer games out there. To stand out among the masses, one must have something special. Crate Mania twists the common scenario a little by giving players the ability to disguise themselves as crates.

What do you think about these widget games? Do you know other fun widget games? Share using the comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Users can add or remove widgets to fit their personal preferences. There are already thousands widgets available today on Apple’s Dashboard download page, and who knows how many more are there scattered all over the internet. Users can even create their own widgets.

Some widgets are the ‘smaller versions’ of full-featured applications although not all are. That doesn’t mean these widgets are below the quality of the “real applications”. Many widgets are even so good (like these ones) that they should’ve been made available as stand-alone applications.

Imagine using a currency convertor widget like this one, to convert a whole list of different currencies. You’ll probably have to switch between Dashboard and your desktop a million times.

It turns out that it’s possible to detach widgets from the Dashboard and make them available as individual applications. Here is the way to do that.


Enable Developer Mode
First thing to do is to put the Dashboard in the Developer Mode. You can do that by launching Terminal (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal) and typing in the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

Hit Enter or Return.

To avoid mistakes, I suggest you just copy and paste the command.

The second step is to restart the Dashboard. But instead of logging out and logging in, type in another command in the Terminal:

killall Dock

And again, hit Enter or Return.

Drag the Widgets out and back in
Now you can press the keyboard shortcut assigned to show and hide the Dashboard. The default key would be F12 (or in some keyboard F4). You can change the settings by going to System Preferences → Expose & Spaces.

After the Dashboard appears, drag the widget that you want to detach. While still dragging, press the keyboard shortcut again. The Dashboard will disappear but the widget will stay. You can move it around the desktop and it will always stay above other applications.

You can drag as many widgets as you want out of the Dashboard and into the desktop by repeating the above process.

You can also drag the widgets back into the Dashboard by reversing the process: drag a widget on the desktop; and while still dragging, press the keyboard shortcut. Drop the widget back on the Dashboard, and press the shortcut key to go back to the desktop.

Disable the Developer Mode
If later on you decide to disable the Developer Mode, you can do so by typing in this command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode NO

Hit Enter or Return, then continue with this command:

killall Dock

And hit Enter or Return.

Other methods
Using the Terminal commands is not the only way to detach widgets from the Dashboard. You can also use free widget called DashIt or a paid app called Amnesty Singles.

Please note that if you’ve moved the widgets to the desktop then disable the Dashboard, for example by using MainMenu, the widgets will disappear along with the Dashboard.

If you know other methods to pull widgets out of Dashboard, please share using the comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Your Mac is also the kind of machine which can go on fine for ages without the need for rebooting. My Mac’s last reboot was three weeks ago when I installed a few software updates. So, the maintenance arrangement seems logical.

But if you are the kind of person who can’t leave the machine without turning it off, or if your machine is in the office where the rules require you to turn it off every time you leave it, your Mac might have missed several maintenance schedules, and the cumulative effects could cause several glitches.

In the rare cases where the automatic maintenance schedule fails, you are advised to do it manually. However, one of the alternative applications that can help you is MainMenu.

Upon installation, this small app – about 1.4MB in size – will reside in your menubar above next to the clock and other tools like Bluetooth and Airport status. From this menubar icon, you can access MainMenu’s menus.

The first thing you would want to do is to go to the “Preferences”

and choose “General”. Make sure that the “Start MainMenu automatically when I log in” box is checked. This will make sure that it will always be available for you to use.

You can choose what kind of menubar icon you want to use from the “Appearance” tab.

The “Log Window” tab gives you options to display the log window and set the hotkey.

“Batch Tasks” might be the most important tab of all. Here you can choose what tasks need to be done when you choose “Execute Batch Task” (Command + R).

There are two main groups here: the tasks that need no restart after executed and the tasks that do. But it seems the developer has saved the latter group for the next version of the app.

For me, I would check all of the boxes in the Batch Tasks except for the “Clear All Browser History” and “Empty All Browser Caches”.

Another tabs are “Updates” and “Registration”. Note: no registration is needed for version 1.x.

MainMenu’s Menus

Now let us see the menus.

For those who don’t want to be bothered by the little things, just pick “Execute Batch Task” (Command + R).

The “Maintenance Scripts” I mentioned – that run in the middle of the night – are available at the top. There are the “Daily”, “Weekly” and “Monthly” scripts, but to make life easier, choose “All Scripts” to run.

Other menus are: “Disk Utility”, “Rebuild”, “Cleaning”, “Finder” and “Others”; each with their own sets of tasks that you can explore and choose.

But the one that I find most useful is the “Disable Dashboard” task from the “Others” menu, as I almost never use Dashboard and its widgets.

I could use the extra power gained from disabling Dashboard to other “heavy” activities such as composing my next hit with Garageband or editing my vacation videos in iMovie.

Do you have any other favorite utility tool? Share your experiences using the comment section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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It’s one of these addictive little tools that I just can’t stop playing around with, and I have been using it for over two years.

KlipFolio sits on your desktop. It can float freely or dock to either side and work as a sidebar. It can be as large or small, as flashy or unobtrusive as you want it to be. It’s fully customizable. That’s its beauty.

What can KlipFolio do for you?

It could be used as a tiny desktop feed reader, but that’s not really how it works and as such it may not be very convenient. As you may realize, KlipFolio is more sophisticated than a simple, text based feed reader, yet it can not really replace your feed reader. You can use KlipFolio to track eBay auctions, follow YouTube video additions, see what’s up on MUO, keep a To Do List, follow the news or always know what’s hot on Digg.

Reading Klips is simple, no matter how small it is. When you scroll over a Klip it will automatically expand, and when you scroll over the entries, a preview window with more details will appear. To get the full story however, you will still need to load it in a browser, and that’s the drawback compared to a dedicated feed reader. A great advantage of course is its versatility and style.

I want more!

You should start with adding some more Klips that interest you. Visit the KlipFolio website and browse what they have. Once you find something, click the Add Klip link and it will automatically attach to your collection. To add RSS Feeds you first need to get the Feed URL, then click on the Feed symbol in the KlipFolio toolbar, eventually paste the URL, click Add Feed and you’re done. You can add multiple feeds to a single Klip, for example add all MUO feeds to one Klip and some other blogs feeds to another. To remove a Klip, right-click on it or click the tool symbol and go to >Manage Klip >Delete.

How can I customize it?

It’s easy as pie! You can drag&drop your Klips around and resize them by holding down the bottom right corner. Through the tool symbol that sits in the title of each Klip, you can edit its display settings or further customize each Klip. If you’re in for some serious customization, right-click the KlipFolio toolbar or the tab symbol in the top left, and choose >Options. Here you can change the settings of single Klips, select a skin, change KlipFolio’s Transparency, edit its text font and size, and more.

It’s taking up too much space!

The number of Klips can easily get out of hand, even when you resize them to tiny buttons. Running it as a floating window may subsequently become inefficient. As mentioned above you can run KlipFolio as a sidebar. With Auto-Hide enabled it will not take up any screen space at all. Drag the bulk of Klips to the top, bottom or side of the screen and it will dock. Next go to >Layout and check >Auto-Hide to make it vanish.

If you like you can even run two sidebars or a floating window and a sidebar or two floating windows at the same time. Start with dragging out one Klip and see how it suddenly has its own toolbar (possibly minimized), then proceed to add Klips to it as you like. The cool part is that even when you re-arrange and re-size the Klips in a docked sidebar, it will jump right back to its previous order when you undock it. You see, the tool is very versatile indeed.

Have you tried KlipFolio? What do you think? What are your favorite Klips? Please share!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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If you’ve always wanted to look up another language besides English, you have several options:

• Add additional language plugins to Dictionary.app
• Use an online dictionary
• Use a program which acts as a desktop interface for an online dictionary
• Get a separate translation application

The first option (plugins) is obviously the most convenient for use because then you would get your foreign translations with the hotkey even while using other applications; but it is difficult to find these plugins for Dictionary. There are some, of course; and I have listed them below. You could use DictUnifier to make your own plugin by converting StarDict dictionary files into the format which Dictionary.app recognizes (see tutorial here – external link) but it is a tricky procedure and is not recommended for the faint of hearts.

Otherwise, the next three options are just as good although using an online dictionary will require you to be connected to the internet, obviously.

Here are some translation tools which I have found and I hope they prove to be useful to you. All of them translate from the foreign language to English. They are Dictionary.app plugins unless stated otherwise. Clicking on the link will download the application.

Arabic

Arabic Dictionary (8.8MB ZIP)
Alqamoos Almuheet Arabic-Arabic Dictionary (5.8MB DMG)

Chinese

CEDICT (39.1MB ZIP)
Atomix Dojam [Independant Application] (13.7MB DMG)
Yazi [Independent Application] (2.1MB ZIP)

Croatian

Mini Dictionary [Dashboard Widget] (3.3MB ZIP)

Danish

Danish-English Dictionary [Independent Application] (3.9MB DMG)

Dutch

Van Dale [Dashboard Widget] (49KB ZIP)

French

Mac Translate [Desktop Interface] (944KB ZIP)

German

BeoLingus German-English (183MB DMG)
OpenThesaurus German (21.6MB DMG)
dict.cc Dictionary Plugin (188MB ZIP)
LEO Dictionary [Dashboard Widget] (25KB ZIP)
Mac Translate [Desktop Interface] (944KB ZIP)

Hebrew

Limon [Independent Application] (373KB ZIP)

Hungarian

SwiftTranslate [Independent Application] (12.5MB ZIP)

Italian

De Mauro [Dashboard Widget] (49KB ZIP)
Mac Translate [Desktop Interface] (944KB ZIP)

Latin

WORDS Latin Dictionary [Independent Application] (14.3MB DMG)

Japanese

Mac Translate [Desktop Interface] (944KB ZIP)
*OS X’s Dictionary has already got built-in support for Japanese! To turn this option on, go to the preferences in Dictionary and check the Japanese dictionaries you need.

Polish

Polish-English Dictionary [Dashboard Widget] (84KB ZIP)

Spanish

Mac Translate [Desktop Interface] (944KB ZIP)

Swedish

Lexikon [Desktop Interface] (99KB ZIP)

Thai

Thai Dictionary (40MB ZIP)

Alternatively, you could use StarDict, they have a huge selection of dictionaries but the interface is a little painful to the eyes. Otherwise, TranslateIt! is a very good translation application which is shareware (you can try it for 20 days to see how it is) – if you are trying to translate Russian, this is the tool you need.

How do you get your translations? Do you use any of the applications listed above? How do you find them? Are there any better ones which I should have listed? Let me know in the comments!

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.

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Who would want to have dozens of windows open while trying to explain some website to a fellow worker? It seems that there have been a lot of people who have been frustrated by working with others because there are quite a few tools out there to deal with this problem.

The tools that are going to be mentioned are all free to use and do not require you to install any programs at all. Just visit each site and you’ll be ready to work.

1.Scriblink

This tool has been mentioned before in the Make Use Of directory, and it’s probably the fastest to set up. All it requires is for you to go to the website. No extra clicking, just start it up and invite people to join you. Scriblink is basically a giant whiteboard where you and your fellow workers can get together to jot down ideas. While it may seem silly to draw on white space, you have the option of uploading images, which you can later mark up.

You also have very useful features such as saving what you have, printing everything out, or sending it to for your boss to see. The chatbox makes it easy to communicate with others without having a separate IM window open.

You can also have the option of chatting via VoIP. However, I do not have a microphone or a webcam so I am unable to test this function out. If you try this feature out, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Scriblink is a very simple to use way of communicating with other people.

2. Twiddla

Twiddla is currently my favorite way of working with others and has also been previously covered here at Make Use Of. It’s simple to use, and you don’t even have to register which makes everything faster. This site has a plethora of features. One of the most notable features is that you can visit other websites within Twiddla and mark things up. This is extremely useful if you want to show a worker something you found and is much better than sending the link via mail or something similar.

Here you can draw freehand or use many different shapes to get your message across. You can post sticky notes as well as images you upload. Like Scriblink, you have the option of saving your work and can chat with others via voice or IM. It’s also very easy to invite people to your Twiddla. Just give them the link along with the password (if you choose to set one) and they’ll be able to work together with you. This is a very handy tool with many features that every business person should use to work with others.

As much as I love the tool, I’d like to warn everyone about some problems I’ve been having with Twiddla. I’m not sure if Firefox 3 is causing the problem or if Twiddla itself is causing the problem, but I’ll sometimes lag out or Firefox will remain frozen for a long time. The app runs fine in Internet Explorer, but I hope this ‘problem’ gets fixed because I really don’t want to use IE just for this site. Anyway, it’s definitely worth checking out.

3. Vyew

The final web app I’d like to cover is one called Vyew. Vyew is a nifty site that seems a bit more complicated than both Scriblink and Twiddla, but has a ton of great features you’ll love to use. I’ve just recently discovered the site, and I’ve pretty much fallen in love with it. As soon as I can figure out how to use all the available features, I’m sure I’ll be using Vyew more than Twiddla.

Vyew includes most of the features from both Twiddla and Scriblink, including the option to draw, chat, and print out your work. With Vyew, you will get those options along with many others. Here are just a few awesome features.

• The folks at Vyew have made it possible for you to be able to share your screen with others. This way, your co-workers will be able to see exactly what you’re doing.
• You can upload much more than just images. The upload feature supports documents, PDFs, Powerpoints, and even FLV videos.
• You can take screenshots of your desktop if you’re too paranoid for screen sharing, which works just as well.
• There are many plugins that you can add to your Vyew. These plugins include a graphing calculator, Flash Video player, MP3 player, polls, and more.
• An innovative feature called the Vyewbook makes it easy to separate your different meeting. One could be for your boss, one could be for your friends. It all depends on you. Within each Vyewbook, you can have many different pages on which to have content. One page could be for all the pictures, and the other could be all the videos/music.

I have tried every of those features except for the screen sharing because I can’t find anyone to share my screen with. The other features work fabulously, and I can guarantee you won’t be disappointed when you use this tool. Granted, it is a little confusing to figure out at first, but looking at the demonstrations really helps.

While Vyew is completely free to use, you’ll get extra benefits if you pay. Without paying, you’re subjected to some ads and limited to 20 users (which is still a lot). You will only be able to have 5 Vyewbooks with 50 pages. You’ll be able to have more users and more Vyewbooks if you pay, but most home users should be content with the free offer.

This tool really is awesome, and I hope you guys enjoy all the features. Just take a few minutes to find all the features. Some are dugg really deep and it took me a while to find all the great things.

Hopefully, these three tools will be able to help you in all sorts of different collaboration problems. You have Scriblink for the simple tasks, Twiddla for most other uses, and the powerful Vyew to tackle even your toughest jobs. I hope you’ll find one you like and stick to it.

Do you know any other great collaboration tools I might have missed? If so, please tell me about it in the comments.

(By) Ken Burkes, who is an active web surfer that diggs, stumbles, and blogs in his free time. Being too lazy to get a blog of his own, you should stay up to date with Make Use Of to find more of his articles.

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For this is a tribute to Dashboard – Mac’s solution to Konfabulator.

I’m going to list most of the widgets I use often and some which I think may come in handy for you. Not every widget may hit the right spot for everyone, but the thing about widgets is that there are just so many of them! So if I missed your favorite one, do tell me about them in the comments.

Here we go.

1. WeatherBug Widget

I feel that this is the most essential widget and definitely a must-have on your Dashboard. WeatherBug is more informative than the regular Weather widget in the sense that it provides details about wind velocity and direction; forecasts with Highs and Lows; and links to satellite images of your country of residence. I’m sure you would like to know that it’s probably going to rain before heading out for a picnic, wouldn’t you?

2. Dashalytics

Do you have a blog with Google Analytics installed? Then you must know what I’m talking about when you have to constantly log into your Analytics account just to check how many hits you’ve had today? Dashalytics does all this for you. It will show you the total number of visits, pageviews, percentage of new visits and other general visitor overview information. It will also show you the graph you have on your Analytics Dashboard.

3. Currency Converter

Especially for those of you who travel a lot or often have to deal with foreign currencies, this is an absolute must-have! It will convert between multiple currencies at the same time and you can keep adding as many currencies as you want on the table. Also, typing * performs an inverse conversion against all other currencies. I found this widget super handy while I was travelling around Europe.

4. Punk

On the lighter side of things, I use this widget to do a little research before I go off to the movies. Type in the name of the film, it connects to IMDB’s database and then returns with the rating of the movie. Quick and easy. I wonder how highly rated ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley‘ is. Hmm.

5. Countdownr

A simple countdown widget to help you count the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the next special event in your calendar. It allows you to set alarms and every event can recur daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. Never again forget your anniversary, your partner’s birthday or your project deadline!

6. Twigget

Is Twitter your life? Are you an online-social-networking freak? There are a lot of alternatives for a Twitter desktop application, but there’s nothing that pleases me more than simplicity. Turn this widget on, sign in, and start twittering.

7. Abracadabra

Got files or folders to hide from others? I sometimes keep some folders away from prying eyes with this widget. It’s much easier than setting up a password-protected DMG. Just drag-and-drop the files and folders you want to hide into this widget, set a password and lock it. The file you dropped in the widget will now have disappeared from the original location! To restore the file, unlock the widget and choose what you want to release from the magic hat.

Learn how to do this manually on Windows here.

8. Snooze

I love to listen to music just before I go to bed. But its a chore for me to get up to turn off my Mac in the middle of the night. After I found this widget, my nights were undisturbed and it’s so easy to use. Enter the amount of time you would like your Mac to countdown before sleeping itself and it does the rest. Of course, you could use it for other reasons, for example, setting the sleep timer to correspond to the estimated time remaining of your downloads.

There are lots more useful and cool widgets out there. Although I would love to cover all of them, it’s close to impossible, unfortunately. Tell us your favorite widgets and how/why you use them.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time med student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future. He also manages a Mac news site, Macnifying.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Just one thing to keep in mind. If you have too many items in your menu bar they might get hidden behind the actual menu for whatever program is in current focus. The program menu takes precedence over the apps.

Here are my five favorite menu bar items:

(1) Gmail Notifier

If you’re not one of those people who keeps your browser open all the time, with at least one tab on your GMail account, then this little Google doohickey will come in very handy. It’s a Gmail icon that sits inconspicuously in your menu bar. That is, until someone sends you an email.

Then the fun begins. The icon turns from menu bar gray to Gmail red and to draw your attention up there, it plays a configurable little email sound. If you’ve got Growl installed, it’ll even show you a pop-up summary of the message (which you can turn off if it gets too annoying.) As long as you have unread messages in your inbox, the icon stays red and the message count appears next to it.

Click on the icon, and you’ll get a menu with options like “Compose Mail”, “Go to Inbox” and “Check Now” and a list of the latest new messages in your inbox. Pretty darn handy, if you ask me.

But wait, there’s more. If you use something other than Gmail to write your emails, no prob. You can configure it to open up any number of other mail clients (mail.app, Thunderbird etc.)

It works on your regular old vanilla-flavored Gmail, of course, but it also works with Google Apps. I’ve got my personal email open almost all the time in a Firefox tab, but I’ve got GMail Notifier configured to “bing” me whenever I get a new message on my Google Apps account.

The Gmail notifier comes pre-packaged with a bonus Google Calendar notifier as well, if you’re into all that “remembering appointments” stuff.

(2) iStats Menu

I don’t think I’ve begun to use the full functionality of this great little app. It’s is a suite of menu icons that keeps track of things like upload/download speed and memory usage. I’ve got three of the possible eight items, currently sitting in my menu bar and I find them extremely useful. (I first used iStats as a Dashboard widget, but “out of sight, out of mind.” I hardly ever used it, since I hardly ever go into Dashboard.)

The underlined ones are the ones I use.

• CPU – Displays how hard your CPU is working. Display for each core.
• Memory – Shows how much RAM is currently being used. Can be displayed numerous ways.
• Drives – Shows how much disk space you have left and has options for showing disk activity.
• Network – Shows the upload/download activity and speed in KB/s. Also has a graphical option, or both.
• Temps – Shows the temperatures of various items like your CPU and main hard drive.
• Fans – Shows the speed of various fans
• Bluetooth – Shows any nearby Bluetooth devices and other options
• Date & Time – Displays date/time. Clicking brings up a calendar and link to iCal

All in all, a great little program that I like to glance up at several times a day. The CPU menu is great to figure out just why you’re getting beach balls all the time. I’ve solved several little CPU hog problems with this. The upload/download monitor is great to remind you that “Oh yeah, I’ve still got that legal file downloading. I wonder how it’s doing.”

(3) Weatherbug Lite

This is a simple little app that does one thing really well. It shows the current temperature in your area (or any area you choose.) Most of the time, that’s all it will do. It will sit there and tell you how balmy or frigid it is outside. And, if you’re outside the US, it understands Celsius just fine, thank you very much. You can also configure it to warn you about weather alerts for your region, so you’ll be aware of that impending blizzard or hurricane before your friends know what hit them.

4. Delibar

Delibar gives you direct access to your delicious bookmarks. The bookmarks are sorted by tag, which can sometimes be a little overwhelming, especially if you’re a tagaholic as I am. Often, though, you’ll just want to see one of the last few bookmarks you’ve tagged and that’s where this comes in handy. The last 15 sites you’ve bookmarked are easily accessible from the top of the list. The only extra feature I would like to see is a live search box, similar to Spotlight and Monocle, but strictly for bookmarks. (Are you listening Delibar people?)

5. Monocle

If you like using Spotlight for searching your hard drive, then you’ll love Monocle. It does for Google what Spotlight does for your drive. Monocle sits as a magnifying glass icon in your menu bar until you click on it, or invoke it with the configurable hotkey (I chose ⌘G as my hotkey) Once open, just start typing and it shows you the Google Suggest hits for your search terms. Hit enter and it takes you to the Google results, or results for any number of other search engines. You can add as many as you want and you can switch between them without leaving the keyboard. Monocle is great if you don’t have a browser window handy, but want to do a quick search.

I’d love to hear about what’s in your menu bar.

(By) Jason Mayoff is a radio newscaster and tech geek. If you’re ever in Montreal, Canada you can catch him on CJAD 800. You can also find Jason at pleasantnights.com, where he talks about keeping an organized and clutter-free home.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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