Monday's Mac Gadget
by John F. Braun
Cool Dashboard Widgets! |
Welcome the Widgets
Mac OS has always had a method to extend functionality via a method that doesn't require the creation of a full-blown application. Early users of the Mac may fondly remember Desk Accessories. Simple DAs, such as Calculator, Notepad, Keycaps and Puzzle, were included with the operating system. Those who graduated to Mac OS X discovered Preference Panes, which would appear in the System Preferences. And those who have been paying attention know about the cross-platform Konfabulator, which offers Widgets. In Apple's latest OS X release, Widgets are supported by the new Dashboard environment. Some nifty Widgets are included, but the developer community has really embraced Apple's version, and have come up with some really neat stuff.
Marquee 1.0.1 (Freeware)
Trifinity Software
Every computer user should come up for air every now and then to experience the outside world. Marquee will display what's showing at your local theatres. Just enter your ZIP Code, and you'll get a list of what's playing, shown in an old-style movie marquee, complete with lights.

Marquee Widget
For those with multiple nearby theaters, you can select the next or previous with arrows on the top row. For screens with lots of movies, you can click on the up and down arrows. For movies with many showtimes, hover the cursor over the movie, and all of the times will scroll from right to left.
Fontsee 1.0 (Freeware)
Remainder One Software
If you're a Mac user and in the design realm, you probably have a pretty good collection of fonts on your system. But at some point, one may lose track of what each one looks like. The good news is that the Fontsee widget can quickly allow you to see what each of your fonts looks like.

Fontsee Widget
You can select a font via either a popup menu, or go to the previous or next font in your list with the previous and next buttons. To make the font size larger, press the small 'a' and to get larger, hit the large 'A'. If you have some time to kill, you can view each of your fonts in order by pressing the Play button.
TV Tracker 1.5 (Freeware)
Monkey Business Labs
If you'd like to know what's on TV, you can of course grab a paper or local guide to see what's on, or check out the listing that is available on many cable systems. But most of these require one to dig through lots of information before getting at what you want. TV Tracker makes finding out what's on at the moment very easy.
TV Tracker Widget
Just enter your ZIP code, and the widget will ask which cable system or nearby city you'd like to use for your listings. You can select how many hours of information you'd like to download, if you'd like to auto-update the listing information, and which channels you'd like information for. Then fire up TV Tracker, and you'll see what's showing at the moment. You can scroll to list other channels, if they don't all fit in the TV screen.
So take advantage of the multitude of Widgets available for Dashboard, and give some of these a try today!
Have any other Widgets you can't live without? Send an e-mail to John, and he'll give it a spin.
Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you with those cool things that we all just have to have on our Macs. Shareware, Freeware, Postcardware, Emailware, and even commercial apps, Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you find and use the best of these programs.
John is a software engineer who works in the corporate R&D group of a Fortune 500 company, focusing on all aspects of communications technology. He has several degrees that claim he knows what he's doing when it comes to computers. After watching co-workers reinstall Windows, search for device drivers, and experience other horrors during the day, he's glad that he comes home to a Mac (compatible) computer. Have any comments, suggestions, or favorite Gadgets? Drop John a line at
You can also Post Your Comments below.
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Observer Comments
Mon Jun 13, 2005 2:05 pm Subject: Only in US/Canada
You can easily make version 1.0.1 of this widget work in Canada by doing the following:
1. Open the Marquee.js file.
2. Change line 318:
FROM:
if( ZIP && ZIP.length == 5 )
TO:
if( ZIP && ZIP.length >= 5 )
3. That's it... it'll work in Canada fine!
Hope that helps someone in Canada.
~Matt
Re: "I never realized it until I moved out of the States how much the rest of the world just doesn't exist..."
And yet on Apple's Dashboard page I've seen quite a few localized widgets from around the world. Ottawa, Holland, Germany, etc. With the ease of widget assembly, it seems to me that ambitious widget makers are taking on the task themselves regardless of locale. Makes sense. I don't need a widget to view daily traffic snarls in Berlin any more than they need to see Atlanta's. The exception to having those kinds of localized resources would be for traveling. All in good time?
Marquee has the same weakness that Sherlock's movie pane does: its coverage of the local chains is actually pretty good, but its definition of "nearby" is fairly mechanical, listing nearby theaters in traffic-clogged areas while excluding more distant ones that are easier to get to. It would be nice to have at least an adjustable distance threshold, as with the phone-book widget.
Tue Jun 14, 2005 11:17 am Subject: Re: Distances in Marquee
Tell me about it - that was always one of the most frustrating things with Sherlock 3 - the lack of localised content unless you were in the US - I still don't understand why Apple went to the lengths of creating a Watson clone and then letting it fester without much in the way of compelling content.
Presumably they were expecting a flood of channels to erupt like we've seen with Dashboard widgets but the learning curve was too enormous to let people develop channels easily.
It's a shame too because there are somethings the Sherlock is ideally suited to, for instance presenting a really useful tv schedule that takes up more screen real estate than should the scope of Dashboard allows.
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