The easiest and fastest way to add specific functionality to your Mac is via the humble and oft forgot OS X Dashboard Widget. From international headline cable news and converting color codes to weather and sport, have a good look at this top 10 Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets list with tips, reviews and a whole lot more.

• WeatherBug Local Weather (download, image below) — An oldie, but definitely still the best weather widget. You get the forecast, radar and even a local (where available) live weather cam, as well as plenty of links that deliver an enhanced look at your (US) weather.
— See also: WeatherOffice (Canada) via MacUpdate
— See also: Radar In Motion

• Sports Fan (download) — Are you a fan of baseball, basketball, football and/or hockey? This is the way to follow your fave teams and get all the stats.

• Sunlit Earth — The original Sunlit Earth Dashboard Widget is back! Created using Cocoa in Xcode, this version is completely Mac native and is designed to run on Mac OS X 10.6.8 or higher.

• iStat nano (UNAVAILABLE for download) — A system monitoring widget with a tiny footprint and a beautifully animated user interface.
— See also: AnalyticsWidget

 • Advanced Scientific Calculator (download) — Apple’s default calculator widget is just fine for performing occasional sum, product or division. For heavy duty crunching, eCalc’s ASC is just the medicine.
— See also: Mortgage Caculator (i.e. house hunting online)

See also: How To: Disable Dashboard in OS X Mountain Lion

• MiniTV (download) — Allows you to watch International TV News right from Mac OS X Dashboard. Available stations include BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, ABC News, MTV and more than a dozen more.
— TIP: If you have a second monitor, MiniTV will continue playing in fullscreen after you leave Dashboard, so you can keep working in your primary display, nice.

• Currency Converter (download) — Features include automatically updated exchange rates, support all the traded currencies of the world, support the old legacy european currencies (like italian lira, deutsch mark, french francs) and much, much more.
— See also: Color Converter

• Sudoku (download) — A logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle, the objective of Sudoku is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid contains all of the digits from 1 to 9.
— See also: Snake (download) — Play snake and discover Whosegame, a site of independent video games. 

• Facebook::Alert (download) — A new social networking widget that checks your facebook.com account for any new Messages or Pokes — scratch that itch!

 • RSS Reader (download) — Remembers your favorite RSS feeds and lets you scan through them to look for new posts.
— See also: Review: Reeder is fully featured, Lion compatible
— See also: Daily Dilbert Widget: Don’t go a day without sarcasm

I very much wanted to include an iTunes lyric Dashboard widget, but couldn’t find a fully functional one. My longtime favorite lyric widget, TunesText, is no longer being supported and, unfortunately, doesn’t function properly anymore, though it still displays lyrics I already have.

Further, you can manually add lyrics, but the automagical functionality is largely gone — lyric Dashboard widget suggestions?

Gotta favorite OS X Dashboard Widget? Share your story and a link in the comments below…

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