Übersicht: Finally, a Good Widget Solution for OS X

Widgets are popular for a reason. They serve a useful purpose and users really seem to like them. It seems everyone except Apple realizes this. Android, Linux and Windows operating systems all have facilities for displaying widgets on home screens and/or desktops. Conversely, Apple sweeps them onto a quasi-desktop called the “Dashboard” that takes a special effort to view. You know the old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind”. And that’s where Dashboard widgets stay. And Apple keeps making it easier to get rid of them altogether. As of OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), there’s a dropdown in System Preferences-> Mission Control that lets you select to use Dashboard normally, as an overlay or turn it off completely. I select “Off” because I never seemed to use the hard-to-get-to widgets. It’s a real shame, because there’s some really useful ones like for viewing stock prices, weather, calendar, world clocks, package tracks, etc., but if I have to make a special effort to view a limited-function widget for information, I figure I might as well open an app or web page and do it right.

Well, now there’s a great alternative called Übersicht which, according to Google Translate is German for “overall view”.  I don’t know how accurate that is, but what I do know is Übersicht is a great little free app that lets you put easily-customizable, stylish widgets on your desktop. There’s also a free gallery with (at the time of this post) 75 free widgets for displaying all sorts of data on your desktop. There’s weather, stock quotes, ping times, clocks, calendars, train schedules and a ton more. There’s also quite a few for monitoring your system, like battery status, disk space, memory, network, CPU usage, etc. These can really come in handy if, like me, you have too much stuff in your menu bar and would like to offload some of it onto your desktop. Yes, Übersicht runs in the menu bar.

The app works by adding an HTML5 layer on top of your desktop. Widgets are just small pieces of web code that reside as text files in a widgets folder Übersicht creates in your ~/Library/Application Support folder. Clicking the menu bar icon reveals a dropdown that includes a Finder link to the folder for easy addition of new widgets and editing existing ones. There’s also a link to Übersicht’s on-line widget gallery where you can download widgets for free. Once downloaded and unzipped, installing widgets is as simple as dragging them into the widgets folder.

Customizing Übersicht widgets is as simple as editing a text file. I use TextWrangler, but all you really need is OS X’s supplied Text Edit. Now, I’m no HTML5 expert, but I do know enough to change widget colors by changing the value of a “color” tag and place a widget where I want on my desktop by changing integer values of “top” and “left” tags. One word of warning: If you plan to put two of the same widget on your desktop, you have to edit one of them to change all the variable tagnames because Übersicht overlays a single HTML document over your desktop. I wanted two ping widgets so I could monitor two client servers. I discovered that simply changing the location and server address of the second one left me with a confused mess. That's when I realized separate widgets are all part of a single HTML page, so all tag and variable names must be unique.

The good news is, most of the free widgets don’t require any changes at all. And let’s face it, how many widgets do you need? I chose a weather, stock quote, calendar and ping widget and placed them around the edges of my desktop where I can see them most of the time. It relieved my menu bar of two items (by adding Übersicht, that’s a net loss of 1).

I can’t help but recommending Übersicht. It is free after all. It’s also fun to play with. I’m the kind of person who likes to monkey with things and Übersicht’s widgets are like a playground. Don’t be surprised if you see a MacTexan contribution to the widget gallery in the near future.