This is the next instalment in the ‘widget focus’ series. By the way, what the hell was I thinking when I thought of that name… could I get any geekier? Widget focus? wtf? What a loser I can be!

Having covered skiing and basecamp, I thought it was about time for running…

On the Nike+ website they have recently released widgets for tracking your current goals on Nike+. I’m going to assume you have at least heard of Nike+, but if not go check it out, it really is quite a cool way to move you away from a computer screen and get some exercise. Anyway, the widgets they have provided are, in classic web 2.0 style, in beta- but work fairly well. They take up a fair bit of screen space, but other than that they look nice with a funky ‘wet floor’ style reflection going on. The only problem I had with them is that you can’t have more than one running at a time – well, you can, but the second one defaults to whatever goal was showing on the first one when you reboot OS X or whatever, which is pretty pointless.

In use, you flip them over and the widget asks for your login details, as you’d expect. After logging in the widget gives you a dropdown of the goals that you currently have active. I noticed that when going to download them from the Nike+ website, they only showed up when the country selected was the US, so you may have to change your country settings temporarily.

Available for download in both Yahoo Widget Engine and OS X dashboard flavours, they are a really nice and quick way of keeping up to date on your current running goals in Nike+. Go check them out.

The Nike+ widget running under Yahoo Widget Engine on Windows…

… and running under OS X.

For the uninitiated, Basecamp, from 37 Signals, is a web application aimed at project management. From 37s themselves:

“Basecamp is a unique project collaboration tool. Projects don’t fail from a lack of charts, graphs, or reports, they fail from a lack of communication and collaboration. Basecamp makes it simple to communicate and collaborate on projects.”

At work I have to deal with a lot of small (and some large) pieces of information, questions, to-do items and more being thrown at me every day from around the world. Although not everyone I work with is Basecamp savvy, they know at any time that they can log in and the current status of a job, task, or larger project from our Basecamp account. Plus, it makes me look super organised and efficient – never a bad thing in your bosses eyes! If you want to try it out there is a free plan which let’s you use just one project at a time, or there are one month trials for their other plans – just click the banner below. Trust me, if you work in a role where you are responsible for keeping track of, well pretty much anything, it’s well worth trying out.

Easy access to the flow of information, contacts, tasks etc. is pretty critical when it comes to actually getting work done. Now, Basecamp itself is pretty accessible anyway, but a widget never hurts and makes things that bit easier. This is where I have a confession to make – I work on a windows box. Bummer eh.

Headquarters Basecamp Widget from Clearspan Media

As such, the widget I use most is ‘Headquarters’ from Clear Span Media. This runs under Yahoo Widget Engine (formerly Konfabulator), which has to be installed on your Windows machine first. I think the widget is fairly fresh, and at the minute only gives read-only access to your Basecamp account. This however is a pretty good start, and it’s now permanently embedded on my work desktop. You can drill through to-do’s, contacts, messages and milestones on a per project basis pretty efficiently. I look forward to the time when you can write changes back to your Basecamp account with this – I’d definitely consider paying for it too. Another example of a widget well done – saving time by having a focused purpose.

The Mac still gets some serious Basecamp Widget loving though, with a well rounded widget from Kennedia Consulting. In true Apple Dashboard Style it’s extremely slick looking, again with all the relevant info that you might need close to hand. A former Apple pick of the week, is thoroughly usable and makes accessing simple Basecamp info from your Dashboard dead easy. Thankfully I try to avoid using it as much as possible – it’s Macs at home, Windows at work for me so it doesn’t get used as much as maybe it could.

Mac Basecamp Widget

It’s still read-only from your Basecamp account – so (for now) no editing back to your account without logging in via your Browser. A sneak peek at version 2 bodes well though, offering resizeability and write access – I just wish they would hurry up and release it already.

It looks like I may be using an old version of this widget – or I may just be plain wrong. I’m going to reinstall this one, get it working properly and rewrite this – the Apple Download page seems to think differently to me.

Update: I can’t get this widget working for me any more. It just sits there and does nothing. You may have more success though – give it a try.

Finally we have the Telescope widget (again for Macs). Until recently this was a plain vanilla rss reader widget with some Basecamp orientated design going on (selecting projects from a dropdown for example). When I checked back on it though to write this article I noticed that it was updated in late October to provide some more advanced features, making it a good competitor for OS X Dashboard space to the widget from Kennedia.

Telescope Dashboard Widget

It’s main use is as a quick overview of Basecamp project status. In order to accomplish this it’s a bit of a beast and takes up a fair bit of screen real estate, but I think that’s a bit of a necessity to really accomplish this well. Flicking through projects is quick… and, wait for it… Telescope also offers write access to your account in the form of to-do completion! Super useful for checking off what you have completed in the course of a day’s work without having to dip into Safari or Firefox.

It’s not quite as beautiful as the widget from Kennedia, but it’s still nice and otherwise it does a good job. The best thing about all of these widgets is that they are currently free, so you can quite happily run all three if you so desire – there’s nothing stopping you.

A final, honorable mention goes to Sundial, a Dashboard widget designed specifically for time tracking within Basecamp. I haven’t signed up for a high enough plan for time tracking, so I can’t really evalute it’s functionality – it sure looks nice though!

Sundial Dashboard Widget, image courtesy Clearwired.com

If you’re a Basecamp user already I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve looked for something like these already. If you haven’t fallen under the spell of Basecamp already, get stuck in and get organised.

In a new series of posts I’m going to give a quick rundown of my favourite widgets for the OS X Dashboard.

The Snow Report Widget is one of the stock widgets that apple supply with OS 10.4, yet I recently rediscovered as winter, and ski trips, beckon.

Quite simply it’s just brilliant – all the info about your chosen resort, a nice UI, and with a very focused task. Basically, just what a widget should be. Waiting for winter just got a bit more exciting :)