Ooh, Nice Operating System

Just updating to the new OSX and enjoying finding out how many of the widgets don’t work here in India (like the weather and mapping utilities) and how many simply repllicate useful utilites I already have on my Palm (especially calculators and converters). I don’t want to get too cynical (I’ve already had a widget-rant), but some widgets are pretty useless from a productivity standpoint (amazing as it may sound, people once bought Macs for greater productivity, not just for coolness-sake). There are lots of flaming logos (remember the IBM ad?) in the widget-world.

But there is some good stuff as well. Already some widgets, like bpm widget, WordPressDash (when I get around to updating to WordPress 1.5), ittyBittyMIDI and the various webcam widgets look useful and interesting. In time I’m sure we will see more internationalisation of traffic, weather and postal widgets, plus some other things, like a widget that handles stocks on all major bourses, not just the US ones. The other interesting side-effect of dashboard widgets is that they let you run a much, much leaner dock!

But, aside from widgets, the one application in the new OS that really has me excited is automator. There are a bunch of actions that I would like to automate, particulary related to emailing images, filing music clips and pdf services. That might not make me cooler, but it might make me more productive, which would be nice.