The sense you get is that Dashboard is barely limping along, its development community dwindling, it’s days numbered. You also used to be able to see when widgets were last updated, but - no doubt to hide the fact that many if not most of Dashboard’s widgets are three to four years old - Apple’s removed that information, too. That’s how I originally discovered stuff like Radar in Motion, weather alternatives like Weatherbug or Bjango’s wonderful iStat Pro. Apple had a “top 50” view that let you see the newest widgets or the most popular ones by download. Visit Apple’s Dashboard page and it’s like time-warping back to 2005: an uninspired, low-resolution content filtering system that jams everything into tedious, way too broad lists. ( MORE: Get a 12-Month Xbox Live Gold Membership for $35) I haven’t noticed a new widget for Dashboard in ages, and the feature’s once vibrant development community appears to be in a tailspin. Ars wrote a piece last July calling OS X Dashboard a “ghost town,” well, because it is. And I don’t blame him for gradually pulling support: Of Apple’s listed 3,896 total Dashboard widgets, I’m guessing only a handful are still being updated. I’m not here to pick on the author of Radar in Motion (in fact I’d rather praise him for cultivating such a terrific little widget all these years). If you have visited The Weather Channel’s website anytime within the last several months, you noticed that they changed to an entirely new interactive weather map. You probably have noticed the same thing you get an error at the top of the widget that says “Warning: Map could not be loaded.” Unfortunately, this has seemed like an inevitability for awhile. I recently noticed that the regional radar data from The Weather Channel has stopped working. But late last year the widget finally stopped working outright, and when I visited the author’s website, I discovered a post titled “ Radar In Motion might have comes to its end“: As I understand it, most if not all of the problems had to do with NOAA or The Weather Channel periodically reshuffling things on the backend (as sites are wont to do) and not Apple or OS X. I’ve used it to monitor everything from derechos to tornados to the 2010 snowpocalypse.īut it started glitching a few years ago, and the time between fixes kept increasing. ISTAT PRO DASHBOARD WIDGET DOWNLOADYou could just download a handy widget called Radar in Motion, for instance - arguably the most elegant of the bunch - unencumbered by ads or stealth links that redirected you away from Dashboard to some vendor’s ad-littered web bazaar. Radar in Motion grabbed radar images straight from NOAA and The Weather Channel, then displayed the animations based on your location criteria. Getting a decent weather radar map working in Dashboard used to be a simpler matter. Do that, click “add,” and your custom swathe appears in Dashboard - a micro-browser bookmark that routinely refreshes whatever you’ve culled. You have to drag it out using “Customize Toolbar” and click it, which prompts a purple toolbar to drop from below the Bookmarks Bar, instructing you to select a resizable portion of the current web page. In case you’re glancing at your Safari toolbar wondering what I’m talking about, it’s not visible by default. The web cutout is a custom piece you pull together using the scissors button in Safari’s toolbar. ( MORE: The Internet of Things: Hardware with a Side of Software) Next to it are other irregularly sized boxes: a calculator showing the number 192 (the square footage of a possible deck for a house), a calendar, a dictionary (displaying the word “cantilever”), the current temperature (minus seven degrees Fahrenheit in Ann Arbor, Michigan as I typed this) and a web cutout of a weather radar map. The widget hovers over a drab, gray backdrop that looks like the grippy underside of a floor mat. I get it using Apple‘s default weather widget, a basic proxy for The Weather Channel (“powered by Yahoo”). Each morning I shuffle down a barely-lit hallway from my bedroom to my office, sit in front of a MacBook Pro in the dark and swipe the trackpad using three fingers to haul the entire screen right like a presentation slide-transition effect. Follow a diehard daily OS X Dashboard user.
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