I may have missed a memo or post on a Mac forum or news site, but it seems to me that poor old iSync is slowly being phased out.

One of the first screenshots I saw of OS X showed iSync and my thought was: “Cool!”

When I first got my Mac, the only icon in my iSync window was .Mac – it looked very lonely with the Sync Devices button way over the other side. I was almost ashamed at being glad to add more icons when I got a Bluetooth phone and then an iPod.

First of all was the move of .Mac syncing to it’s own system preferences panel:

More recently the updating of contacts and calendars on iPods was also removed from iSync and moved to iTunes.

Personally, the only thing I have left to update is my mobile phone – maybe this’ll be moved to Address Book?

Actually, the more I think about it the more logical it seems. It’s a nice idea to have a central syncing app but I personally don’t always have my iPod and mobile phone handy at the same time, so iSync throws up a message about one or the other not being available – having them sync with their respective apps as and when they’re connected is a good idea. I should have realised that before I started this post …

There are many of you out there that sync your PDA’s with iSync, but I don’t have one of these so I can’t comment on how this may be changed if at all.

By the Dashboard light

I was thinking about Dashboard the other day and how little I use it – when I first heard about it I imagined having several thousand widgets running in the background, sapping all my iMac’s CPU cycles.

For the uninitiated, Dashboard is a feature of Mac OS X Tiger and, put simply, is a second desktop where you can have none, some or many “widgets” performing various functions and supplying you with information. These widgets are basically little programs and their uses range from simple clocks and calendars to weather displays and web-cams to translation tools and unit converters. There are several hundred different widgets available for download, some free and some not.

I only have five widgets running on my Dashboard, most of which aren’t entirely necessary and only really serve as something to look at.

First up we have the standard calendar view with the simply superb iCal Events, the only widget I couldn’t live without:

Then we have my view on brother’s world – he moved to Oswego, Illinois, last year (both these widgets come with Tiger):

And last, but by no means least, we have the completely narcissistic but completely addictive ShortStat widget:

So, there you have it: a particularly uninteresting view of my Dashboard. If any of you are running Tiger then let me know which widgets you find indispensable.