Sunday, January 6, 2008

Leopard - Useful new feature Webclips

One useful feature that is included as a native part of Leopard is the ability to build a custom widget that is displayed in Dashboard. In Safari v3.0 a new icon appears in the toolbar
(a pair of scissors with a dotted box) that once clicked on allows you to select an area of the current web page to be monitored. Once you've selected the area you click the ADD button which puts a new Widget on your Dashboard. There are limited formatting options at this point in terms of the type of box that the web clip is displayed in. One thing that would be useful would be the ability to label the Widgets.

Overall, a small feature that previously you needed to use third party software and a couple of hacks to have this functionality. At this point I'm still experimenting with web clips having setup two 1) to monitor the current inventory of refurbished Macs on Apple's online store and 2) to monitor the ongoing auctions of vintage Macs on eBay.

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