Web Clippings: Now I Love Dashboard

ByMike Moffit

I’ve long been anti-dashboard. I find that the widgets consume more RAM that is reasonable and can bog down systems not loaded up with memory and running on older hardware. Thankfully, I use a top-of-the-line 17” MacBook Pro with 6GB of RAM so don’t have to worry about processor speed or memory constraints. But I’ve never really used Dashboard.

Sure, Leopard was released in October, 2007, and I’ve been using it ever since. I even knew about Web Clippings, one of the myriad new features in the operating system. But until now I haven’t used them. We have several dozen security cameras throughout our retail stores, warehouses, and offices, and it’s often helpful for me to see the video stream from several of these cameras. While the web interface we have is perfectly functional, it is clunky, and I grew tired of navigating through many web pages any time I wanted to see what a camera is seeing.

The solution was web clippings, and now I have quite a few on my dashboard. I have local and regional Doppler radar, several security cameras (which I can see from home while connected to our virtual private network, or VPN), and quite a few other clippings. A quick press of F12 gives immediate access to all of this information, which would’ve taken over a minute to see before.

If you have not yet used this feature of MacOS X Leopard and Safari 3, check it out. All you need to do is click on the web clippings button in Safari’s toolbar, and then drag a box on a web page to make the clipping. Dashboard will open, and you can place the new widget wherever you’d like.

Similar Posts

  • iChat Add-on

    Dawn recently introduced me to a cool little program you can download to work in iChat, called Chax. The following are the Chax…

  • Thunderstorms and Your Computer

    It’s that time of year when we seem to start getting more and more thunderstorms. If you’re one of the many people that…

  • World AIDS Day: Make a Difference Today

    Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day—an internationally recognized day designed to raise awareness of the people who are affected by the AIDS virus every day.

    I’m sure you’ve seen PRODUCT RED special edition products that, when bought, the manufacturers donate a percentage of the profits to the Global Fund to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. (Apple’s red iPod nano and shuffle are good examples—if they would let us carry them, we would!)

    We must all come together in supporting the Global Fund and the fight against AIDS. …I applaud (RED) and its partners for their vision and commitment.
    -Nelson Mandela

    NIGHTS, the Concert Series that Saves Lives.

    (RED)NIGHTS is 27 nights of music performed by musicians you love that is fueled by your posts to Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Check out (RED)NIGHTS here# and get started… all of this raises money to keep people living with HIV in Africa alive.

    • Goes Mobile.*

    There’s also an iPhone app for (RED)NIGHTS that includes a visualizer and an equalizer to “show the audio spectrum in real time.”

    Download the (RED)NIGHTS app here.
    Shop (PRODUCT) RED.

  • Hijack your Airport Express

    By Matt@smalldog.com Airport Express is a great product, beautifully designed and executed by Apple. If you don’t know about it, it is basically…

  • AppleCare…To the Rescue

    While Apple’s products have significantly lower rates of failure than a lot of their competition, things do go wrong from time to time. When I got my iPhone 4S at launch, it would occasionally restart itself. At first, I thought nothing of it, considering I was coming from an Android device that rebooted itself so often that it might as well have been saying, “Hey, just in case you forgot you customized your splash screen, here it is again!”

    A couple of weeks ago, my phone didn’t just restart itself, but became a useless brick until I gave it a hard reset while plugged in. A quick Google search revealed this issue to be a symptom of hardware failure known in the diagnosis log as “panic.plist.” I checked my diagnosis log and there it was, three “panic.plist” occurrences in the past week. After a brief phone call with AppleCare, I was given the choice of sending the phone back to them and waiting close to a week for a replacement or to have a $730 hold placed on my credit card while they sent me a new phone overnight. As I didn’t have another phone to use, I opted for the latter.

    Normally, to have a phone sent overnight would cost $30 but because I had AppleCare, the fee was waived. Cut to today; the hold has been lifted and I have a shiny new iPhone that has yet to give me an issue. Granted, I was within the original one year warranty, but had this happened after that first year, I would be scavenging Craigslist for a cheap replacement. Thanks, AppleCare–I owe you one.