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Well, WordPress 2.5 has been released for about a week now, and I’ve been able to grace Webmacster87.info with its presence after spending some time last night doing an update. I’ve had some opportunities to play around with the new admin interface and some of the other changes, and since this is such a significant update to WordPress, what better time to do a review of the update? So, I’m going to take the time now to discuss some of the things that I like about the update, some of the things that I don’t like, as well as talking about some of the things that I’ve done to Webmacster87.info during last night’s update.
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Tags: 2.5, administration, Dashboard, features, interface, review, update, widgets, WordPress

In yesterday’s Leopard Feature Presentation, I did my best to review Dashboard, even though it’s one of those features that I haven’t really taken part of. However, Leopard introduces another thing for Dashboard, but this new feature is aimed towards developers. It’s called Dashcode, and it’s an integrated development environment specifically for Dashboard widgets. Although it’s great for anyone who knows all of the JavaScript necessary for making a custom widget, it’s also advertised as being easy enough for anyone to make a widget without writing any lines of code. Yesterday, right after I finished my Leopard Feature Presentation on Dashboard, I opened up Dashcode to give it a whirl. Let’s take a look at how it went.
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Tags: application, Dashboard, Dashcode, development, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Macworld, review, Software, widgets, XCode

Although Dashboard may have been another one of those “staple” features of Tiger, I kind of stopped using it after a few months. Looking back, I’m not sure why. It could have been that Dashboard started to seem less and less useful, or it could have been that every time I started up my computer, Dashboard would take so long to load all of the widgets, or because I kept hitting F12 accidentally when I wanted to hit the Delete key, but I haven’t actually used Dashboard in a few months. I might try it out again sometime, although I haven’t gotten there quite yet.

However, one of the new Dashboard features in Leopard is something called Web Clip. Although Web Clip is considered a “widget”, and even appears in the “Dashboard Dock”, you actually activate it from Safari by clicking the Web Clip button in the toolbar. This gives you a way to select a section of a web page, and then by clicking Add, that portion of the web page will open as a widget in Dashboard. (By flipping the widget over via the customary “i” icon, you can choose a “theme” for the widget.) Although I don’t have too many comments on Web Clip, I’ve tried it out a few times, and it works quite well and is actually very flexible. As Apple has indicated in its demonstrations of Web Clip, this can be very useful for many scenarios when a user wants to have a way to easily track an auction, see the latest issue of a comic strip, grab a webcam, or do anything else quickly and easily.

However, I was a little disappointed to not see very much more added to Dashboard. In fact, one of the things that I might recommend for Dashboard would perhaps be a Dashboard implementation of Spaces. After all, if I can have virtual desktops for me to navigate around groups of windows, wouldn’t it be great to be able to move around just as easily within Dashboard? That would probably allow me to solve one of my issues of not being able to fit enough widgets on one screen as I have open. This would also allow a way to easily group widgets together so that I could have a group of widgets that I just look at briefly, versus another group of widgets that I might spend more time in. All I’m saying is that I’d kind of like Dashboard to be a little bit more accessible, and am disappointed that other than Web Clip, Apple hasn’t done any tweaking of the Dashboard user experience.

However, for those of you (unlike me) who use Dashboard and have made it a regular part of your habit, Web Clip will probably give you a nice range of new widget options, and it couldn’t be easier to use.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: Dashboard, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, review, Safari, Spaces, Web Clip, widgets