Some Dashboard Widgets are making us more prepared for disastrous events and calamities (and making us rely less on FEMA). After someone came up with the Seismac, which transforms your Mac into a seismograph, Apple is now offering a free dashboard widget - the WeatherBug Hurricane Watcher. This app enables you to watch the latest satellite images for current or developing storms. It's features are the following:

-Satellite images of active storms with multiple views.
- Access to an interactive Storm Tracker that tracks the path of current hurricanes, as well as ones dating back to 2000. It also provides interesting facts on each storm.
- Access to the latest weather news stories and hurricane information.
- Access to your local weather conditions.

Download: [WeatherBug Hurricane Watcher]

Looks like this Apple Person who is also a Wii Fanboy isn't waiting for the official launch of Nintendo's next-gen console. Nope, he just went ahead and made the Wiimote Widget for the Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.

The ode to Wii widget is still limited in function but clicking on the A button takes you to Nintendo's web site. "What more could anyone want?" says its maker. Can we click on another button and tell us when the Wii will finally hit the stores and how much it will set us back?

Download: [Wiimote Widget for Mac OS 10.4 Tiger]

Apple has recently released a maintenance update for the Mac OS 10.4.7, with an added background daemon that reports to Apple information about your computer when you launch the Dashboard. The Widget Advisory could be the nagging girlfriend or the, to quote the now defunct Destiny's Child, your bug-a-boo boyfriend. The feature is so easy to use that there is no obvious way to actually turn it off. But of course, if there's a will, there's a way.

In the OS X Terminal, launch a window and enter:

sudo mv /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist /etc/mach_init.d/
dashboardadvisoryd.plist.disabled

And then reboot.

And then give it the it's-me-not-you excuse.

Remember those cute and overachieving bunnies tagged as the Nabaztag Bunny? In case you aren't familiar with it, this cutesy contraption has been tirelessly packaged as the world's first intelligent bunny which can teach you tai chi, read your e-mail, report the weather or stock market, pull RSS feeds and tell you the time.

Nabaztag can move his ears, play music, talk and whistle, and his body can show off hundreds of colors and special patterns of light, and could also "marry" other Nabaztag bunnies, so don't be too possessive.

With this cutesy thingamajig in mind, GravityGirl decided to make her first Dashboard Widget for Tiger 10.4.x. The product of her sweat and hardwork is the Nabaztag Dashboard Widget which would allow you to control your very own Nabaztag wi-fi bunny, or that of someone else if they give you their API serial number and Token.

According to her, "the first release (v1.0) appears to be stable, but some inconsistencies have been found when an invalid serial or token are used." Here are the list of controls and options.

• controls: on the front of the widget are the ear buttons, a text-to-speech window, and a "go" button to send your text

• on the back of the widget, you will need to enter your serial number and your token. You have the options to control:
• refresh: the amount of time between when it automatically checks your nabaztag to see if someone has moved its ears
• voice: your choice of two French and six English speaking voices.
• ear buttons: the transparency level of the ear buttons. They will still work when fully transparent, they are just not easy to find.
  

She also wants to give credit to Nyami's Widget, apparently this is where she got the idea to make this one. She borrowed the images from Nyami's widget, but had to re-code everything except the regexp statements "because Apple's dashboard uses different calls than the yahoo engine."

Download: [Nabaztag Dashboard Widget v1.0]

I don't know about you but I like to keep tabs on my Mac. I try to keep it from burning up inside (which I usually don't have any luck with), and I like to restart my mac every 1000 hours or so. If you like to keeps tabs on your Mac then you should be using iStat.

iStat is a dashboard widget that keeps track of all your computer's important information like CPU temperature, memory usage, disk space, and run time. This new version supports CPU temp on new Intel macs (Now all I need to do is get one). And like all the greatest apps it's completely free.

Download: [iStat 1.5.1]

Designed by UI expert Piotr Gajos, iClip features stylish graphics and animation that have won a couple of awards. Now another talented Mac theme artist, Pe8er, has come up with a free dashboard widget of the popular software.

iClip lite is a free multiple clipboard and scrapbook widget that will help Mac users improve their efficiency and productivity with tasks done on their computer. Quickly store and retrieve bits of information (i.e. text, pictures, Internet addresses) in the iClip lite's multiple "clip bins".

Now on v2.0, iClip lite is easy to use. The latest version is a universal binary that allows automatic Clipboard recording and widget resizing. The bins have also been increased from 20 to 25 in v2.0. Since users of the previous release of iClip lite saw blank bins, the developer of this widget has fixed the said bug. Other minor bug fixes and enhancements are also included in this new, stylish-looking version.

If your Mac is running on OS X 10.4 or later and you'd want to try iClip lite, feel free to give it a go - download link is below. Enjoy!

Download: [iClip lite v2.0]

Desktop Stats is trying to put all parts of the gamercard function and display on your Mac OS X desktop with their widget, OS X Dashboard Gamercard. The application is now at v1.2 where a few fixes - like the refreshing of the gamercard - has been included. The widget now allows you to enter your gamertag automatically upon first installing it. You will also have preferences that will save your gamertag so that it don't get lost on a reboot or log-off. A few people who've tried this widget tagged it as "cool". So go ahead and download OS X Dashboard Gamercard v1.2 to see another great widget go into your MAC OS X!

Download: [OS X Dashboard Gamercard v1.2]

So you love LOST, and you know Season 3's coming up in a few months. You just can't wait to see the latest happenings with Dr. Jack Shephard and company. Powermacguy wishes to heighten your anticipation for the popular ABC show with his LOST Season 3 Countdown v1.0.

This Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger widget displays the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until October 4, when Season 3 will debut. Currently, the download has no special surprises for users when the clock finally reaches zero. Powermacguy, however, is working on it.

Begin the countdown to LOST Season 3 with the download link provided below.

Download: [LOST Season 3 Countdown v1.0]

Developers of Art Director's Toolkit, Code Line Communicators, gives us a handy widget (collective name for buttons, sliders,menu bars, and title bars) within your Dashboard. This allows tools and features of their application to be more accessible.

According to the Apple site: It can search through thousands of color swatches in industry-standard libraries, view characters and keyboard equivalents of fonts, sample colors on-screen, convert fractions/decimals/units of measure, calculate file sizes, and much more. However, the widget only comes with a copy of Art Director's Toolkit 5. If you're interested in trying it out, click on the read link below.

Cyan's Image Chamber has released TunesTEXT v0.3.3, a freeware Dashboard widget for Mac OS X "Tiger" users. TunesTEXT displays the lyrics of the song currently playing in iTunes. If there is no local lyric information for a given track, the widget will search and download lyrics from the internet. TunesTEXT supports songs both in English and Japanese.

You can get it in our iPod Download Section.