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Unity Dashboard widget contest winners announced
Unity recently held a contest that challenged developers to create Dashboard widget games, using their development environment. Today, they have announced the winners, and they're all definitely worth checking out.The widget Open Fire Beta 12 won the People’s Love category. From your perch high atop what looks like a Thomas the Tank Engine train table (what can I say? I have kids), you can blast away at a hapless parade of tanks and jeeps. Hint: If you can't hit them, at least cause a multi-vehicle pile up. The good news is that they can't fire back. It's like shooting fish military vehicles in a barrel.The Grand Prix of the Jury winner was Overwhelmed Arena, a good, old-fashioned shoot-em-up in space. Choose from four ships, fly around the space station and blast bad guys out of the sky. Go into full screen mode and you forget you're using a widget.There are more, of course, and they all deserve your attention. Check them out and have fun.
Google News Widget
I just tried it out and it works great. Why wouldn't it? Adam has put together a slick little Google News 1.0 widget. The news widget allows you to tune your feeds from a few categories (sports, business, health, etc.) and search via Google News. Too bad I always disable my widgets on my iBook. Seems to work fine on a dual-G5 though... So why didn't Google do this already? Oh that's right, they got no love for Macs...UPDATE: After running the widget for about 20 minutes it crashed. I sent in the report and reopened it. Well that was fun while it lasted.
Widget Watch: Capture
Here's a handy Dashboard widget that gives you some nice options for creating screen captures. Capture by VanillaSoap Design allows you to produce a screenshot, with or without the Dashboard visible, as a JPEG, TIFF, PNG, JP2, PICT, BMP, QTIF or PSD file. You can select your save location (including the clipboard), automatically resize your shot and more. Shoot the whole screen or just a selection.VanillaSoap as a few other decent widgets available, like a bittorrent widget called BitSticks and a few games like Snake and Solitaire. Check them out.
Widget Watch: Easy Envelopes
Here's another great widget for you all this morning. Ambrosia software's Easy Envelopes allows you to quickly and easily print envelopes from the Dashboard. Type in your recipient’s address by hand or search your Address Book. Plus, Easy Envelopes adds USPS postal bar codes for both 5 digit and 9 digit zip codes, and can even handle English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese postal system requirements and aesthetics.It's a great example of doing something simple very well. Check it out.
Widget Watch: Tigergotchi
Okay. As you all know, I hate the Dashboard, and I usually keep it turned off. Nevertheless, when I saw this widget, I was forced to reactivate my Dashboard, install it, and be amused. Why? Because I am a huge fan of the entirely useless technology-as-fake-pet phenomenon.
