Welcome to dashkards 2.0!

This site started out back in July 2010 as a fairly small project which now has evolved quite a bit beyond what I originally had in mind when I published the first handful of cheat sheets. A couple of mentions on popular blogs (thanks guys and gals!) grew traffic to the site from the single digits to a level where I can’t help but think that people really do seem to like cheat sheets.

Along the way a couple of bad decisions made in the early days of the site became apparent, the two major ones being relying on Dashboard’s and Safari’s WebClips feature for delivering dashkards and not setting up a blog and instead publishing updates to a raw XML file. Both of these issues are a thing of the past with today’s release of dashkards 2.0. Please read on for details.

The dashkards widget

The basic idea for dashkards was (and, to some extent, still is) to use the somewhat neglected but perfectly useful Dashboard as a platform for quickly accessible keyboard shortcut cheat sheets for Mac OS X and Mac software.

The problem with the decision to use Dashboard is that the WebClips feature, the foundation of dashkards 1.0, turned out to be broken. So I started thinking about alternatives fairly early on, and today I’m finally introducing the dedicated dashkards widget. It circumvents the broken WebClips problem entirely and offers a few additional benefits that should make it a no-brainer to immediately download and install it. The old way of using dashkards will continue to work, but I strongly recommend you use the new dedicated widget.

The dashkards blog

So far all updates to dashkards have been published to a manually edited feed (seemed like a smart idea at the time). The new blog has the advantage that the feed gets updated automatically whenever I post anything and all the info is right here in the posts to refer to later.

From here on out all the info about new and updated dashkards as well as general info will be published here on the blog (in addition to the notification area of the dashkards widget). If you’re subscribed to updates via Google Reader or any other RSS feed reader, you don’t have to change anything. The old feed address will automatically redirect to the blog feed. If something doesn’t work like it should, please contact me and we’ll get it fixed.

Fan Gear

I’ve always been a fan of geeky t-shirts, coffee mugs and similar paraphernalia. And since there’s healthy evidence I’m not alone in this regard, I decided to design some geek gear for dashkards fans.

For starters I’ve designed a couple of t-shirts – which I call keyshirts – that have the same keyboard shortcuts printed on them as the respective dashkards. The only difference is that they’re printed upside-down so you can refer to them easily when you’re wearing them. I know, it’s genius.

So far I’ve only been able to make keyshirts for Apple Mail and Safari, but my goal is to eventually have geek gear (t-shirts, mugs and mousepads) available for all dashkards. So a keyshirt or keymug for your favorite Mac app is just a matter of time. And apart from being awesomely useful and helping you score high on geek cred, dashkards geek gear helps support dashkards as I receive a portion of all sales I refer (I’m partnering with Zazzle, who take care of all the nitty gritty details of running an online store and making and shipping the goods).

A Big Thank You

A couple of you (you know who you are) have been very generous and have donated to the site, which, quite honestly, completely floored me. I put that Paypal donate button in the sidebar not expecting much of it. On the other hand I’ve donated to free and/or open source projects before, so it’s not like I would have considered donations totally impossible. But when I received those emails from Paypal informing me of the donations, that really did make my day. Goes to show how wrong you can be about people’s willingness to voluntarily pay for something they can use for free.

So, to those who have donated I would like to extend a giant, heartfelt and as-humble-as-I’m-able THANK YOU! You Rock!

Of course I’d also like to thank each and every one of you, regardless if you’ve donated or not. You’ve tweeted, blogged, emailed, bookmarked and facebooked dashkards which extended its reach far beyond what I would have been capable of achieving on my own. And most important of all: You’re actually using dashkards which was the reason I started the site in the first place.

Keep doing what you’re doing and I’ll do my best to keep my part of the deal: continue to publish cheat sheets for your favorite Mac apps, until there are no more left to publish.