Full disclosure: I hate Dashboard. I have found very few widgets that do anything useful for me, and having them invisibly off in some weird dashboardy land bugs me, too. It pretty much limits me to widgets that I use infrequently enough that I don’t want them in front of me.

However, I just found a good one. ProdMe is a widget that beeps at you. It can be hourly chimes (a la MacOS 9), an egg timer, or an alarm clock. It can also notify you via Growl.

There’s lots of times that you need a timely reminder. In my case, it’s usually to check on a database restore or an exceptionally long software install/update. I just go to Dashboard, tell ProdMe to bug me in 30 minutes, and in 30 minutes I get a noise and a Growl notification reminding me to check on the server in question.

Very handy for those one-off reminders that you’d rather not burden iCal with. As for it being off in Dashboard-land, well, who cares? It’s a set-and-forget kind of thing, so it belongs there out of my sight.

Andy Herbert released a bitchin’ (did I just date myself?) little bundle for TextMate, which takes any shell script you whip up in TextMate and turns it into a Dashboard widget. Click the widget, run the script. Easy as can be.

Maybe it’s just because I have a 12” PowerBook, but I keep running out of Fkeys. And besides, it’s hard to remember that F10’s this kind of Exposé, and this Fkey is Dashboard… It’s a bother.

So, to keep my Fkeys free and keep ‘em a little more understandable, I remapped them so that one key (F11) controls Exposé, and another key (F11) handles Yahoo Widget Engine’s heads-up display as well as Dashboard.

How? Well, I just added modifier keys. So F11 shows the desktop (my most common Expose command), CMD+F11 shows all windows (my second most often used command) and CMD+OPT+F11 shows all the windows in the current application.