The Mac OS X Dashboard is something I seem to use less and less. I think the Dashboard widget is a fantastic way to build small applications or utilities to help people keep track of something, do some quick math, etc. but these widgets don’t seem to get as much attention as they deserve. There are still some really great widgets out there.
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 byZoltan 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.