Run A Widget Outside The Dashboard (Another Neat Trick)

Marc from iSlayer.com, the home of the best system monitoring widget known to man kind, iStatPro, emailed me yesterday with another slick dashboard/widget trick. This time we’re thinking outside of the box (ok ok, not a box, but the dashboard). Is there a widget you routinely use, but it interrupts your work flow to keep opening and closing the dashboard? Well Marc’s here to save the day once again. This time showing you how you can use a widget without opening the dashboard! Thats right, you can run widgets right on your desktop so they are available to you at all times.

1. Open Dashboard (this can be done several ways, like pressing F12).
2. Open the Dashboard tray by clicking the (+) in the bottom left hand corner of the screen.
3. Click and hold on a widget’s icon.
4. Press F12 to close Dashboard.
5. Place the widget where you’d like it, then let go of the mouse button.

There are many uses for this trick as you will soon find. Pop the calculator out of the dashboard if your doing some number crunching and have to put the results in a document. If you need to resize a bunch of pictures quickly place ImageShackle on your desktop and away you go. Now you want to upload those images you just resized to ImageShack. Move your ImageShack Widget out of the dashboard and quickly upload the images one after the other. The possibilities are endless! If you’ve found this trick useful check out Marc’s other widget trick, Run A Widget Without Installing It.

iTunes Widget on the Desktop