One of the many great features of Apple’s new OS X 10.5 Leopard that gets overlooked or under used is the ability to quickly and easily create custom dashboard widgets of areas of websites that you visit often or check for important information. You may have noticed a new button in Safari that includes a dotted square line and a pair of scissors. Clicking this will allow you to select a section of the current website you’re viewing and then clicking the “add” button that will appear to place the selected portion of the website on your dashboard widget.
Dashboard was something added in previous versions of OS X but not often used by many Mac owners. Personally, I never used Dashboard before the ability to created widgets of information that I often access. I us it to check sports scores and news information and simply clicking the Dashboard keyboard function to get updates on game scores saves me the time of browsing to the site itself to check the score.
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I also live close to the movie theaters and the widget I created from google’s movie listing for the local theater has been useful a number of times. Don’t forget to make widgets of those sections of the web that you visit often and the information you seek will now be just one click away. How have you used the new widget creation function? What widgets have you made?
