Dashboard isn't "the killer app", but that's not to say it isn't useful. I have found it to be a time saver (at the expense of resources) in a few tasks. Allow me to illustrate.

Home

In the morning I drag myself out of bed and attempt to feed myself. I'm sure it's a comical event, one which my children will laugh at many times. During this entertainment extravaganza I usually check a few things on my trusty iBook: the day's comics, some blogs, and Dashboard. Dashboard will tell me in a glance if I need to dress warm or cold, expect rain, snow, sleet, or sun, and give me an idea of the wicked pollen and it's continual struggle to kill me. If I've purchased something online I'll usually also track it on Dashboard, so I'll know, "Hey! Why did my package go from Nevada to Kentucky?!?"

Work

My office doesn't afford me a view of the outside. It's terrible in that respect. I never know how the weather is doing, and in the cold months of the year (or April) I like to keep an eye on the freezing point so I can make a hasty exit and work from home. That and it's always fun to comment on the weather in chat, because inanity is great stuff! Beyond this I find that I need to generate random passwords for db connections, random text for site layout testing, and sometimes need to know the HTML entity for something strange like the Yen (¥ btw).

For whatever reason people are always asking me about dates. And I hate loading up iCal just to refer to a date on a calendar, so I just go to Dashboard and look. Takes me a brief moment. I also drop sticky notes on my Dashboard from time-to-time, which keeps things greatly uncluttered.

In summary I use Dashboard for those things I only occasionally need, want to keep hidden but resident, and for those things where a quick glance at data is all I need to answer my question. A push of F12 and I get my data is fast, easy, and most of the time I don't notice the missing resources.

I have found myself in a place I thought I wasn't going to be. My writing tools and the way I write are getting in the way of actually writing. CopyWrite is a great tool, but even the authors of the tool call it a project manager for writers. It works great when I want to work on one cohesive project, like say a novel or a novella, but when I want to work on short stories the tool no longer works for me.

The problem I am having now is not knowing where to put things. I don't want to clutter my file system with files, one per story (or as I write, one per fragment of what might be a story). Furthermore, when I approach my writing I sometimes like to see a list of all my "fragments" or all the stories in a certain genre, or even all my stories still in rough draft and needing a first edit, or even all the stories I think are ready for publication. So as I thought of this last night it seemed to me what I need is an application which allows for me to attach metadata to each document, and then query and filter on those documents; in essence it would be an application to manage a collection of short stories (and edit/write them, so I'd want version control).

I still like using something like CopyWrite for novels, because the tools it offers become very helpful, but in something small like a short story where I don't need to track all kinds of ancillary data it fails. This was not a problem a couple of years ago, but since then I've authored 42 pieces of flash fiction, and trying to get a handle on them is driving me nuts, and when I want to start a new piece of fiction but only have an introductory paragraph I don't have a good place to put it.

The other problem I have is one of free-writing. Right now I have a notebook and a fountain pen, which I really enjoy, but I know all too well that if I get on a roll with a story that developed due to some free-writing I won't want to use that notebook for anything else other than that story. There are times when I just want to write something to see where it goes, and I'm still trying to puzzle out how that would look on the computer. I mean, if I had an application which stored things by a "session" of writing, and allowed me to interact with it on a paragraph level (as in I could manipulate paragraphs but not sentences) I might have something in which I could just open the app, type out some crap as it comes to me, and later pull out some paragraphs into my story collection as a rough draft and go from there.

Do I want anything from ya'll? I dunno. Probably not, unless you know of an immediate solution to these problems (that don't involve Emacs). I really don't want to have to develop an OSX app to do this for me because then I won't be writing. But then, if any of you think either of these problems are worth solving it might be something to look into at some point. So maybe more than anything I'm just sharing a frustration and hoping that maybe, just maybe, someone has a constructive and helpful comment.