“For Apple to make fun of Microsoft copying the idea of their “widgets” into “gadgets” is so unbelievably hippocratic that it makes me sick.”

[Spotted in the Dashboard section here ]howler, apple, dashboard, hippocrates, widget, humour, not apple mail

With the SwiftMail Dashboard widget, you can quickly dash off an email using your Gmail, .Mac, Yahoo or AOL email account.

It offers a quick username and password setup or the option of entering detailed server information.

The widget saves the last five subject lines and the recipients in drop-down boxes to the right of the fields:

Call me a pre-Tiger throw-back if you like, but I don’t see the point of these email widgets.

It’s no faster than switching to Mail.app or using Quicksilver to dash off the note.

Perhaps it is faster than switching to Entourage or Thunderbird or the web-based interface of those services.

You can get the freeware widget from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Once briefly QuickMail before becoming SwiftMail (briefly), the widget is now called “DashMail” (for the moment).

[Via TUAW ]widget, dashboard, email, gmail, aol, yahoo, dotmac, productivity

Reminder is a useful little Dashboard widget that allows you to create quick reminders to yourself in iCal, rather like a local version of the Reminders feature in Backpack .

Entering the reminder is easy.

After installation, just call up the Dashboard, enter the time after which you want the reminder and a summary of whatever you need to remember:

A reviewer on dashboardwidgets.com says, “Just the most useful widget so far for me!”

Reminder is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site ical, reminders, widget, dashboard, clever little piece of work

Mail Widget is a Dashboard widget that checks one user-specified POP, IMAP or .Mac account every time the Dashboard is loaded, even when Mail is not running.

A new version released this week runs on PowerPC and Intel Macs. It is also a smaller file, due to more efficient compression of its audio contents for voice notifications.

MailWidget is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .widget, dashboard, mail.app, apple mail, notification

Google has released three new widgets , one for Blogger, one for searching with Google and one for Gmail.

The Gmail widget polls your account and displays the sender, title and (optionally) a short snippet of the message:

Further options allow you to display only messages matching a particular label.

[Via TUAW ]

Clicking on the Inbox or Compose buttons takes you to the relevant screen in Gmail’s web interface.Google, gmail, blogger, widgets, notification, dashboard

This week Address Book and iCal get the lion’s share of the additions to the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.

The following items were added to the Address Book section:

• AddressBookQuickEntry (an alternate entry interface for contact information)
• AusAB (maps, travel directions and Sydney public transport times for Australian addresses)
• iAddressX (Address Book menubar utility)

The following were added to the iCal section:

• DoBeDo (a Dashboard widget for iCal ToDos)
• iCalViewer (“Streaming” desktop iCal events and ToDos)
• MenuCalendarClock (menubar utility for you iCal calendar, clock and ToDo and event information)

Mail.app itself scored two extra entries:

• anentry (AppleScript to email a NetNewsWire headline) in the Integration with other Apps section
• NetShred X (history and cache shredder for Mail.app and browsers) in the Added Functionality section

These additions bring the number of entries on the list to a round 120, all making Mail.app, Address Book and iCal easier, more efficient, more productive and (possibly) more fun to use.

MailWidget, a widget that polls for new mail every time you load the Dashboard, has been updated.

It provides notification of new mail whether Mail.app is running or not. Clicking on the widget launches Mail.app to deal with any new emails.

New features include notification of new mail by a female voice (“fe-mail”), auto-update capability, a German localisation, XHTML compliance and dozens or minor bugfixes.

The developer says that the widget does not work with encrypted secure connections. Also, it only monitors one account at a time, although you can a run a widget for each account you want to monitor.

Personally, I can’t see the point of this. It’s a cold day in Hell when Mail.app isn’t already running on my Mac and utilities like MailAppetizer and MailUnreadStatusBar provide more efficient notification, but widget nuts will love it.

MailWidget is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .widget, dashboard, mail.app, apple mail, notification