Colourmod is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that you’ll end up using much more than you think you would. I’m not a designer but as someone who fiddles around on the web I find myself in need of a hexadecimal color code from time-to-time. And when I do, I use Colourmod.

There are a few ways that I find myself using Colourmod to find the color I’m looking for. The first, and perhaps most obvious way, is to drag the “blue dot” color picker around the main color well and find the color I want making subtle adjustments by using the slider. The second, is to manually enter in the hexadecimal color code that I’m currently tweaking and make small changes until I get exactly what I want.

One nice feature is the blue arrow that will quickly copy the current color code and place that value into your clipboard. This makes finding, selecting and copying a color code into your text editor very, very quick.

Feature suggestions? Sure. One thing I’d like to see is a single text area that gives the proper RGB color values for a color. Although Colourmod supplies these values they aren’t easily selected. I’d also like to see a much easier and more accurate way to use the color picker. It is very tough to make small changes especially to light gray colors.

Oh, and I’d ditch the ‘U’ in Colourmod. But that’s just me.

Well, here is another widget I suggest taking a look at. Whenever any of us geeks order something online we’re feverishly refreshing the delivery status page of our shipper of choice to see where the package is. Well, not anymore. Now you can use Delivery Status.

Delivery Status is a widget for Mac OS X that makes it pretty simple, and dare I say sexy, to track a few packages at once right from your Dashboard. Junecloud has also made an iOS application for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch so that you can track your packages on the go.

I really like how the widget color-codes the statuses based on the shipper. A nice touch.

See, there are useful Dashboard widgets out there. They’re great. And you should know about them.

I want to change that.

I’m going to start featuring well-designed, still in-use Dashboard widgets from time-to-time here on the blog. My personal blog is relatively obscure in today’s tech web but – hopefully – one or two people will find these posts about these widgets. If you’ve run across, or built, any Dashboard widgets you think should get some attention – feel free to email them in.

So lets start out with GAget – a well-designed Google Analytics Dashboard widget by Zoltan Hosszu. (Side note: Zoltan is an awesome name.)

I don’t know about you but logging into any Google Account or any Google product has been troublesome over the last few years. I’ve got personal accounts, Google Apps accounts, work accounts, etc. I get sick of switching. GAget allows me to quickly take a look at any of my site’s statistics by simply swiping (with three-fingers on Lion) over to my Dashboard.

GAget’s HUD shows you exactly what you need to see at a glance; number of visitors today, the trend over the last week, two weeks, or month, the bounce rate, time-on-site, and how many hits were new visitors. Very, very good information if you’re striving to bring up the overall audience for your site.

If you happen to need more information, perhaps for advertising purposes, you can always log into Google Analytics and drill down further.

I have two feature requests: a way to see the top 10 search keywords that people are finding the site with, and the top 10 URLs on the site (besides the homepage). But overall this widget does just enough to keep the stat addict in you well fed.

After playing around with Tumblr for months (I’m cdevroe over there), I finally noticed that the little “page curls” that happen on-hover on posts on my Dashboard from those whom I follow are actually the permalinks to those posts. Man do I wish I found that sooner! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve actually gone to the Tumblr page of the user who posted something I wanted to find the permalink to, scrolled down the page to find the post, and clicked on the date (or whatever their theme had that was clickable). Ugh.

Though I do like the idea, I think this link should be much more apparent.

Side note: A single RSS feed for posts from everyone I follow would be stellar. Maybe it is there and I just don’t know it?

The latest version of the Ta-da List widget.

Keegan Jones, the developer of the widget and a heckuva photographer, was nice enough to give me a copy of the working widget shortly after I complained about it not working.  I was able to get back up and running quickly and let him know that it was working.  Customer service++.

This makes my GTD circle complete.  I use Ta-da List on my iPhone while I’m on the go (mostly to add things to my list so I don’t forget them) and I use the widget when I’m on my computer to check things off as I get them done.

Head on over to Ta-da List, get an account, and download Keegan’s excellent widget.  It will help you, as it has me, Get Things Done for sure.

The erring widget.

I began reusing Ta-da Lists recently when I found out about the iPhone support.  It works beautifully.  When I think of something while I’m on the go, I can add a ta-da list item with my iPhone painlessly.  When I’m back at my computer, I reference the very same list.  I love it.

Up until the other day I was using the Ta-da Lists widget as my way to interact with my lists on my Macintosh computer.  But for some reason the widget now just spins (pictured) while trying to get the lists and their items.

I don’t know what is going on, but I’ve sent a few messages to whomever I could find contact information for.

As a side request: If anyone knows an application, rather than a widget, that utilizes Ta-da lists – please let me know.