Widget Watch: JiWire
Today's featured widget over at Apple is one of the most useful I've seen so far: a JiWire widget. It's the best of both worlds when it comes to wireless widgets: part stumbler, part search engine tool for JiWire's database of wireless hotspots. The stumbler has a completely automated interface to Airport: clicking the link in the widget connects you to any network you can see. In fact, the stumbler seems to be just a wrapper for AirPort's built-in functionality, but it does provide some extras that you can't see in the Airport menubar dropdown, like which networks are open and which have encryption enabled. The database lookup is nifty, too. Results are returned in the widget; clicking on them opens the JiWire detail page for that hotspot in Safari. Who knew the McDonald's around the corner has an AT&T hotspot?
