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Dine-O-Matic (and the Dashboard widgets we love)
Merlin Mann | Sep 6 2006
Dine-O-Matic - Dashboard - Food I've never quite taken to Dashboard the way a lot of folks have. Like that completely baffling Spotlight results "window," it seems to just kind of live off in its own little neighborhood -- one that's just far enough away to discourage frequent visits. “Jeez, Merlin, how lazy can you get about hitting Annnnnnyhow, I finally found a "business case" for Dashboard today with the discovery of the perfectly-delightful Dine-O-Matic, a beautiful and free (as in beer) little widget from the graphical savants over at Iconfactory. This does precisely one thing: it chooses a random restaurant for you to eat at. That's it. No more whiny rounds of "'What do you want?' and 'No, what do you want?'" Because we now have comely robots to make these decisions for us. The dining-out singularity is near! You just pop in the names and cuisine-types of all your local haunts, and then hit the big blue plate. The widget flashes and churns like a slot machine, then picks out the place you and your party will dine. Awesome. Yay, Dashboard.
We haven't talked too much about Dashboard around here, but I'd love to hear from you guys: Which widgets have made you love Dashboard? Has Dashboard become an integrated part of your overall workflow? Or is it just a pretty amusement park? (not that this is bad) 53 Comments
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 I think the widget concept...Submitted by Stephen (not verified) on September 6, 2006 - 8:05am.
I think the widget concept is flashy, but flawed. If I want to track a package, it is unlikely that I will also feel a compelling need to look at the weather loop concurrently. If I find an anomaly in a traceroute, I will want to be able to easily drag it into a mail message. It is just easier to get my weather from an applet in the menu bar (Meteorologist), have three bookmarks for tracking packages (rather than the very pretty Package Tracker widget), and use traceroute in a terminal window. To have all the widgets that I might want to have handy, my dashboard is rather cluttered. When widgets break out of the dashboard and run independently, like Desk Accessories (c. 1984), I will become much more interested in them as little applets that can be run as needed. Moreover, this will mitigate most concerns surrounding a the potential for a widget that is a resource hog. » POSTED IN:
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