I have to say I've been (pleasantly) surprised by the utility of Dashboard.

While a lot of the widgets coming out are either highly specialized or of questionable (to me) use, there are a number that I either use quite often or which are particularly fun to have.

Out of the stock OS X widgets, I use the following regularly:

• Dictionary/thesaurus
• Weather
• Calendar

In addition, I have these installed (more for fun than for anything else):

iTunesLyrics

Grabs the currently playing iTunes song and gives you the lyrics for it.

http://www.dashboardwidgets.com/showcase/details.php?wid=486

WoW Server Status Widget

This widget lets you check the up/down status of your favorite US, British, French, or German World of Warcraft server from your dashboard

http://www.skia.net/dev.php

There are now a couple of different sites where you can see all of the new widgets that are starting to pop up - Dashboard WIDGETS, and of course Apple's widget site. Personally, since I'll be attending this year's WWDC, I'm going to make it a point to attend the widget-writing sessions and give it a go myself.

From CNNMoney, a bit of an opinion piece (with Bill Gates) regarding the iPod, cell phones and Windows Mobile 2005.

Bill Gates: Cellphone will beat iPod

As I've said before, I'd like to see a Windows Mobile phone device actually work well as a phone before whacking in yet more functionality. I'm still waiting to see one that does.

I found the following quote highly amusing:

"The BlackBerry is great but we're bringing a new approach," he said. "With BlackBerry you need to link to a separate server, and that costs extra. With us, the e-mail function will already be part of the server software."

Err, ah, yes, as long as the server software is Exchange...

This is probably more information than anyone really needs on the new Powerbook Mobile Motion Sensor, but it's an interesting read and there're a number of cool visualization apps.

I do find it interesting when a piece of hardware has some awareness of the "real world" though. Anyone remember the Newton temperature sensor?

The PowerBook Sudden Motion Sensor [KernelThread]

(Via Gizmodo.)

I recently received my new PowerBook, having waited until the rumoured speed bump took place. I'm pretty proud of myself for overcoming my usual need for immediate gratification, and actually waiting.

What I ended up with is a 15" SuperDrive model, without the SuperDrive but with 128mb of video memory. This probably sounds a bit strange, but I wanted the 1.67MHz G4 processor which only comes with the SuperDrive model. My iBook, incidentally, has gone to my wife, who's an obsessive digital photographer.

Performance is generally outstanding on this unit. If you're interested, Macintouch has posted a nice performance chart with this model included.

The nicest feature, as I expected, is the widescreen (1280x854) display (which is supported quite nicely by World of Warcraft). One feature which I didn't quite expect to enjoy so much, however, is the "two-finger-scrolling":

I actually use this all of the time now. For those with pre-2005 PowerBooks (and, in fact, iBooks), it seems that there's a hack to enable this (which I haven't tried yet on the iBook).

I'm less enthusiastic about the other new PowerBook 2005 feature, the Sudden Motion Sensor (also known as the Mobile Motion Module), which parks the heads on your hard drive if it senses a "change in axis position and accelerated movement". I'm fairly certain that it negatively affects WoW performance, and I've turned it off. I'm not sure if it's actually a problem with the way the sensor is designed though, or just an artifact of running WoW on a notebook computer balanced on my lap with...ummm...some enthusiasm.

On the serious side, I've started work moving one of our Pocket PC apps to the Macintosh. Learning Cocoa and Objective-C along the way. I'd consider this work to be a logical evolution of the Pocket PC app (rather than a port, that is). And no, I'm not going to say which one at this point :-)

Well, Tiger wins the prize as the most brain-dead-simple, non-problematic O/S upgrade I've done. I like Spotlight (more for the smart folders than for ad-hoc searching), hate (at least initially) the new UI for Mail.app and am ambivalent at this point about Dashboard. Since I haven't made use of Automator yet, all I can say is that I like the icon. Although I'm pretty sure that little robot guy is actually carrying a bazooka.

If you have Tiger, be sure to check out the Dashboard Widgets, Automator Actions and Spotlight Plugins, all hosted by Apple and of varying costs and utility.

Point of relief, by the way: WoW works fine on Tiger.

I had to check to see if today was April 1st when I saw this:

Tiger Direct vs. Apple court documents posted: "As reported yesterday, online retailer Tiger Direct has sued Apple claiming that the company infringed on its trademark with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger..."

(Via MacMinute.)