Day 6 - Widgets & Memory

Hit F12 or click the dashboard icon in the Dock, and up pop the widgets. A collection of useful (?) little programs that can be made to go away again with equal speed. By default there's a world clock (that can show you the time anywhere in the world), a calendar, a calculator... you get the idea. Clicking the option to manage them presents an option to go to the Apple website and download even more, and there are hundreds of them.

My first thought was that even though I'd fiddled with it, the default weather widget wouldn't show me the local weather. The closest I could get was the weather in London which is about 200 miles away and therefore of no interest whatsoever. A quick look through the downloadable widgets and I found one that reported the weather courtesy of the BBC capable of displaying the weather report for my home town.

Then there was a widget that would tell me the phase of the moon, another for tide times. There were quick links into Wikipedia, function references for PHP, you name it, there's a widget for it, and it didn't take long before I had a screen full of the little blighters.


The down side came a little later while investigating the Activity Monitor in the Applications folder; it told me that most of my MacBook's 512mb of memory was in use and I didn't have any apps open apart from the Activity Monitor... or so I thought.

As well as the totals, the Activity Monitor gives a list of what 'processes' are running and how much memory they are using. Silly me had forgotten that hitting the red button at the top left of an apps window doesn't always close an app completely; some of them just shrink down into the Dock and sit there ready for use. I actually had half a dozen apps running including iTunes, iCal, Camino and Smultron.

The real surprise however was the amount of memory being used by widgets. Most of these little dudes were only a megabyte or so of download but were using 20mb of memory in order to be available at the click of a button!


The experience has resulted in my coming to two conclusions:

1. While 512mb of memory on the MacBook sounded like a lot to somebody moving from a Win98 PC, it would seem that given all the things that this baby can do, it isn't. I guess OS X also uses quite a bit of memory to 'isolate' apps into their own little environments and thus protect itself from crashes. I don't know for sure but my point is that I am now wondering how long it's going to be before I start shopping for a memory upgrade.

2. Given that it looks like a memory upgrade would set me back around a hundred quid I decided that I didn't really need single click access to the phase of the moon, tide times and a heap of other stuff for which I'd downloaded widgets. I also closed down the clock and calendar; I have my 'local' time and date on the main screen anyway. In fact I'm now down to the calculator (using 6.44mb), and the weather report (8.77mb), neither of which I really need but without them I'd have nothing at all to pop up when I hit F12.


Perhaps I'll enable a few more widgets later, perhaps I'll splash out on a memory upgrade. At this stage, as I'm not yet using this baby for my normal day to day stuff, I can't really say what resource I need and what spare/extra resources I might have/need.