If you’re a regular reader of this column (and who isn’t, after all?), you know I’ve been raving about Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger”. I’m not the only one giving Tiger a big “paw’s up”. Walt Mossberg, the technology writer for the Wall Street Journal, called Tiger “the best personal computer operating system for consumers that’s out there today”. Just this week, PC World magazine announced the winners of its annual World Class Awards. The winner in the Operating System category? You guessed it: Mac OS 10.4.

Among the many great new features in Tiger is Dashboard. Dashboard is basically a collection of mini-applications called “widgets”, which zoom over the desktop with the stroke of a key or the click of a button. These widgets, for you code-jockeys, are made up of HTML (the language of web pages), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets – another web page language), and Java, the powerful, slim-trim programming language. Widgets can perform common tasks, provide information, or be “just for fun”.

Tiger comes with a suite of great Apple-designed widgets pre-installed. Ever since beta builds of Tiger were released to developers, they have been busy building widgets as well, with many ready for Tiger Day One. Here are some of my favorites, so far.

Apple’s Weather widget. Got kids living in another part of the country (or world, for that matter)? Create a Weather widget for each place. Plus, besides the seven-day forecast, the current atmospheric conditions (as well as the phase of the moon at night) are graphically displayed, and constantly updated via your your internet connection. Very cool.

This Day in History, from the World Book Encyclopedia. Select a day (the default being today), and the TDIH widget goes to the internet to get historical events from that day. The day I wrote this (June 1st), Kentucky became the 15th U.S. state in 1792. If you have the World Book Encyclopedia installed on your Mac (as it is in all new consumer Macs), click a link and you’ll be taken to more information about the subject. Way cool.

Scoreboard. Baseball fan? Scoreboard gives a running report of Major League Baseball action for the day, either for all of baseball or for a specific team. It even tells you who’s batting, runners on base, and balls and strikes. Go Sox!

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski