Like it or not, the first thing a lot of us look at in the morning is our phone or tablet. To that end, a slew of different apps have popped up that seek to get your morning off on the right foot. Here are the best depending on what you're looking for.If you're hooked into the Google system with Gmail, Calendar, Maps, or any of its other services, the Google Now (Free) is easily the best option you have for a morning dashboard.Google Now lives inside the Google Search app. With Google Now, you'll automatically get a dashboard of up to date information about your day, the weather, and a ton of other things you care about automatically. Just load up Google Now, pull up the cards, and everything you need is right there in front of you. It's perfect if you're deeply invested in Google's ecosystem because it'll show you everything relevant to your upcoming day. That said, if you're not big into Google, it's a pretty worthless feature.
SMorning for iPad ($2.99) is probably one our favorite direct alternative to Google Now because it manages to emulate a lot of what Google Now does without requiring an account. Like Google Now, you get access to pretty every upcoming event in your day on a single screen.Unlike Google Now, Morning requires that you set it up a little. You have eight options for your main dashboard, including weather, to-dos, calendar appointments, stocks, news headlines, commute and travel time, the current date and time, or a countdown timer. You can customize the app within those options so you're only shown what matters to you. The basic idea here is to get you just the information you need as quickly as possible.The problem with Morning is that it's not particularly powerful and you can't really do much else with it. That's part of what makes it great, but power users are going to wish it could do a bit more.
Status Board for iPad ($9.99) is a powerful dashboard app that has a ton of customization options so you can use it however you want. Like most dashboards, you get access to email, tweets, to-dos, the weather, or mail, but you also get great visualizations of all that data so you can really understand what you're looking at.If the standard old info on Status Board isn't enough, you can also graph your own data if you'd like, or create your own HTML snippets. Essentially, you can turn Status Board into the perfect dashboard app if you're willing to do a bit of work.Status Board also has output through Apple TV or HDMI, which means it's great if you need to display a bunch of information to a group of people and not just yourself. It might be a bit excessive for the common user, but if you need the extra features and power, Status Board offers enough customization that you can serve up all kinds of data on the screen at once.If you're looking for a completely different way to start your morning, Pindolo for iPhone offers just that. Instead of supplying you with a ton of useful information about your day, Pindola serves up inspiration quotes, songs, and more.It might sound silly, but we've seen before, cuteness can actually make you more productive, so Pindola's not totally off the mark. Instead of boring you with your email or the weather, Pindola gives you an inspiration quote, or a song and happily sends you on your way.
OS X: Odds are, your Mac's Dashboard has fallen by the wayside in recent years (even though it can be really useful), but widgets can still be really handy for certain tasks. WidgetRunner frees them from their prison in the Dashboard, and lets you run them alongside your desktop apps.There's an old trick to do this with a terminal command, but it doesn't seem to work for most Mountain Lion users. WidgetRunner works on modern Macs, doesn't require a terminal command, and doesn't even saddle you with a complicated interface to set everything up. Just open the app, click the main dropdown menu in your menubar, and hit "New Widget." Your custom-installed widgets can be found in /Users/username/Library/Widgets, and the default widgets will be in /Library/Widgets. Just click the ones you want, and they'll populate on your desktop where you can drag them wherever you wish.By default, widgets will act like regular windows, and disappear behind any other active applications. But if you want one to float on the top of the screen, just right click it and change the widget position to "Top." You can also set widgets to "Desktop" mode, which effectively turns them into part of your wallpaper. You won't be able to interact with it at all unless you first click the WidgetRunner icon in your dock, but it's great for passive information widgets like weather or stocks. The relevance of most widgets has been diminished by more powerful web apps over the years, but if there are any that hold a special place in your heart, this is a great solution to keep them close at hand.WidgetRunner (Free) | MIT via MakeUseOf