Widget Wackiness

One of the most-hyped features in Mac OS X Tiger is Dashboard (basically, it’s full of glorified HTML + JavaScript bundles that do stuff). While the overall usefulness of Dashboard is questionable, the Unit Converter “widget” does come in handy from time to time. Unfortunately, Apple didn’t do that great of job in making the actual unit conversions as accurate as they should be; also, some conversions that would be handy (teaspoon/tablespoon/cup conversions, for example) weren’t included. Being the ever-so-helpful person that I am, I fixed this.

Download the updated unit conversions here. To install this file:

• Save the Conversions.js file in some appropriately generic location.
• Open the /Library/Widgets folder, and control-click on the Unit Converter widget. Select “Show Package Contents”.
• Drag the file into the Unit Converter folder. Click Authenticate on the first dialog box, then Replace on the second dialog box, then enter in your password.
• Open Dashboard, click on the Unit Converter widget, and hit Command-R to refresh the widget.

Things I’ve fixed from the Apple-supplied version of the file:

• Added teaspoons, tablespoons, milliliters, imperial pints, and imperial quarts to the Volume conversion list.
• More accurately defined nearly all of the non-metric units in the Volume and Speed lists (the mi/hr to mi/min conversion in particular has a noticeable rounding error in the Apple-supplied version).