There’re some widgets which deserve to coexist with your other desktop applications all the time as one require’s them so frequently that the F12-Click turns into a tedious task after time.

For example if you want to see your TagBag tags all the time, it’d be usefull to put the widget somewhere on the left side of your gourgeous Apple Cinema Display

There’s even a simple solution for this. If you activate the dashboard developer mode, you can drag’n drop dashboard widgets onto your desktop, so they’re always available. I do this a lot with the stickies widget as it’s a great way to save quick notes

Or read the corresponding article at macosxhints.com:

macosxhints – 10.4: Detach widgets from the Dashboard
Mac OS X, Tiger, dashboard, development, apple, mac, tagbag

Just recently Microsoft announced that they will be using the Firefox RSS icon for RSS services in Vista and Internet Explorer 7. That’s a big thing, almost as big as the well known hell-freezing-over. Microsoft, having labeled Open Source as a sort of ‘cancer’ some years ago, decided to use something which was developed under an open source license.

They did this as they feel that it’d be better and less perplexing for the user to have similar icons for similar services. So wouldn’t it be great if you’d be able to use this very icon for your Safari Browser too? Joining in into the new and joycie world of uniformity? Now you can: Mac Specilialist released a “fix” which changes the Safari RSS icon to the Firefox/IE one.

Mac Specialist

Most of us know about h264, Apple’s implementation of a so-called ‘AVC’ codec in Quicktime7. H264 creates video files of very good quality while still being able to greatly reduce the file-size.

H264 is actually only an implementation of a standard and thus several other AVC codecs are available, for example Ateme or VT7.
In addition to that, there’s x264, an open source implementation of h264 by the nice guys who also brought us the VideoLan Player (VLC).

x264 just recently won a competition against other impressive codecs like “DivX 6.1″, “XviD 1.1″ or “Ateme 1.4.0.3″.

Now someone managed to compile x264 as a Quicktime extension, so one can use it for encodings and decodings under Mac OS X.
x264 offers more detailed encoding options compared with h264, and I read that the quality should surpass h264 though I’m not really sure about that and didn’t test that either.

x264 QuickTime Codec
h264, x264, codec, tiger, mac os x, videolan

Although Mac OS X has built-in Zip-Support, Spotlight doesn’t index or search those files. It would of course be a very usefull feature if Spotlight would index Zip-Files just as well.

And that’s just what Ziplight is for. It indexes your Zip-Files, and allows to search them via Spotlight. One drawback is that it doesn’t index the contents of those files as that would require to unzip each file in order to parse it.

Bartas Technologies – Ziplight

I’ve never used .Mac, but one of the features which I lusted after was the ability to sync the calendars, bookmarks, contacts, mails etc among your Macs (if you have more than one that is ;) )

I researched a bit into this area, and tried to build a little tool by uploading the Database files to a WebDav server, but that ain’t syncing and it felt so kludgy that I quickly stopped doing so.

Now TUAWTUAW reports about an Application which uses the built-in sync-features to sync several Macs, just without .Mac.
Great

Read more here.