Customize your Mac's "Unit Converter" Widget

Customizing a Mac OS X Widget might seem a daunting task. It's not really. It's a mater of understanding what the Widget does and then add to that.

In the case of the Unit Converter, what it does, it does beautifully. It makes just about any conversion from and to related units. Ever wonder how many BTUs (British Thermal Units) make up a Calorie? Just pull up the Unit Converter, select the Energy catagory, the BTU and Calories sub-catagories and enter '1' into the BTU area. You're immediately told that it's 251.99576 calories. Yea, it could have rounded this to 252 calories, but that would end up corrupting the data if you chose to then convert those Calories to Joules and then back to BTUs. With any rounding, you'd end up with screwed up results. Just accept the exact results and do your own rounding as needed.

Now, where it's lacking, is that it doesn't do Numeric conversions. I'm confronted frequently by people that just can't understand why that 10GB Hard drive they just purchased has less than 9.5GB. Well, let's see if the Unit Converter can answer that...

Step 1 Get Apple's Dashcode Beta Utility

Apple has just released the beta of Dashcode. This will be a utility included with OS X 10.5 (Panther), but you can get it right now! If you're not already registered as an Apple Developer, do so now. It's free and gives you access to some neat things like this very beta!

Click this link to get Dashcode. Register now as a Developer to get to it.

Proceed to install the utility. It will be available in the folder /Developer/Applications/Dashcode. If you haven't already, install the Developer package from your OS X 10.4 DVD.

Yes. Tiger (10.4) is required for this Instructable.

Comments

[chand_shah121]

i get a parts.js cannot be deleted alert message when I try to deploy as deploy to dashboard does not appear..

[JaketheSnake]

I wouldn't trust this Widget.... Look at these screen shots ... uhh... WOW !!!!!

[LasVegas]

It's not meant to be exact but to convert from many very different measurements. To do this requires complex multipliers and dividers that have their limits. I would say that without rounding, those answers are quite close!

[sam]

Well.. my iBook G4 ran a lot faster on panther than it does on tiger.. maybe its dashboard, maybe it isn't... but how do you turn off dashboard anyway?

[LasVegas]

You don't. If you have no widgets active, there's no overhead. How much memory does your iBook G4 have? I've found in most cases that Tiger actually ran faster than Panther unless the Mac had less than 512MB RAM.

[Ian01]

Actually, you can turn off Dashboard. Here's how. Or you can do it with the command line.

[sam]

Well I only have 384MB.. so there's the problem!

[JonMorgan]

Hi, I had this widget on my G4 iMac, but I can't seem to find it anywhere to download for my MacBook. Can anyone point me to a site where it's available? I loved this one and really miss it! Thanks.

[LasVegas]

This widget is part of the 10.4.3 update. If you're missing it on your MacBook, download the current Intel 10.4.8 Combo Update and install it... This will also update anything else that might have been missed in the interim.

[Mr.Devious]

You know what I did to mod my widget part of os x? I turned the fucker off, nothing but using memory.

[LasVegas]

I guess if you're running Tiger on a Mac 9500 running 250MHz with 128MB of memory, you'd have to remove Dashboard. Any relatively recent Mac isn't effected by the piddley overhead used by Dashboard.