I rely on a few widgets. I use the built-in weather, dictionary, and calendar widgets frequently (e.g., to get the date a week from next Tuesday). I also frequently use Locker, Network Stat (to change locations between proxied and unproxied), and WakeOnLan (to wake up my home fileserver).

I have a few widgets that I use — the LiveJournal one, the the Transmit one, etc, and they’re quite nice. But the one widget without which I would be lost, adrift on the sea of discourse is… Dictionary. I use the hell out of that sucker. Plus it’s always vaguely gratifying to open Dashboard and see some 5-dollar word in the dictionary there.

The widgets I use are Album Art Amazon Art (imports album art into iTunes) Character Pal Package Tracker Pear Lyrics Dictionary

The common thing about all of these, except for Package Tracker, is that I’ll spontaneously want a small piece of information (“What’s that word mean?”, “What was he singing?”, “How do I type that?”) and get it through dashboard. Clocks, games, calendars, search bars, I have little use for.

Pretty amusement park. I get a glimpse of weather once in a while through the built-in widget, and I check my Mint stats semi-frequently. That’s it. If I need a calculator I bring it up, then close it. Nothing else has proven particularly useful in my daily computing.

For a while I used the Transmit widget from Panic, but once I figured out DockSend did the same thing without sitting there, that honeymoon was over.

As far as workflow goes, I’m a fan of the Backpack widget. The rest are all for news and play: CPU temp., local weather, Wired News, BBC Headlines, an NPR tuner, BBC tuner, IMDB and Wiki widgets. Last, and certainly not the least…dead center of my Dashboard: Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. I’ve stopped visiting Apple’s widget collection on account of the clutter. I don’t think I really need the lunar phase widget.

I don’t really use Dashboard much. The following widgets are somewhat useful though:

Javadoc search widget - http://seriot.ch/JavaDoc TextMate Projects widget - http://lists.macromates.com/pipermail/textmate/2006-May/010279.html Remind widget (Found this on 43Folders) - http://nick.vargish.org/software/remindwidget/

I have some running that I could live without but the ones I USE are, iStat nano (Processes section helps a lot when my system stalls) (http://islayer.com/), Calculator (one less piece of equipment on my REAL desk), Calendar (Save your walls for pictures of your family), and White & Yellow Pages search.

I like to keep track of fast-moving storms that may flood my basement, and hitting f12 is a quick way to load weatherbug and a few other widgets (including the built in weather widget) to give me all the information I need at a glance. I also find dictionary and package tracker to be useful from time to time.

I commute on my bike 9 months out of the year. I use the Weather widget and Radar In Motion to check for storms. I also use Flytecomm to track flights (great real-time tracker with map).

For any fellow procrastinators, the Do It! widget has done more for me than the combined works of David Allen :)