How To Get Your Daily Fix Of Comics On Your Mac.

From Dilbert to Calvin & Hobbes to Doonesbury I need a daily fix of comics. The problem is that I no longer subscribe to the daily newspaper, and sometimes forget to buy a Sunday paper.

Where do I get my daily comics? From a Widget. Dashboard Widgets are made to give us a quick look at something important, then go away.

There are a few Widgets for the Dashboard that pick up daily comics, two of which are decent, one of them is close to great. It’s just works.

Here’s how to set up a Widget to get comics in your Mac’s Dashboard. First, Click Here to download the Daily Comics Widget from the Apple Dashboard Widget site.

Second, drag and drop the downloaded Widget into your Mac’s Widget library. Easy enough, right? Now, which daily comics do you want to read?

Daily Comics will pull down a healthy number of daily comic strips, and expand the Widget size to accommodate different sized strips. That is especially handy for the much larger Sunday comic strips.

The Widget has three buttons in the upper left corner. A left arrow, to go back. A right arrow, to go forward in your list of comic strips. And a center button. Click the center button.

That will shrink the Widget. You’ll see the standard Apple Dashboard Widget “information” button, an italicized “i”. Click it. Daily Comics will flip over to reveal preferences.

This is where you can select the comic strip you want from a huge list. The list of your favorites is on the left. It’s called Favorite Comics.

The entire catalog of daily comics is on the right side of the Widget, under the heading, Browse Catalog. Scroll through the comics available and select one. Click the Show button, and the comic will display as the Widget turns around.

Your selected comic also shows up in the Favorite Comics list. Repeat that process until you have all the comics you want in your favorites list. To delete a comic from your list, select the comic, then click the Delete key.

It’s that easy to get full color, daily and Sunday comic strips on your Mac.

One of the first things I do each day is read the comics. My Mac is set to start up at the same time each morning. The Mac startup chime is my alarm clock. It’s loud and does the job. I snooze for a few more minutes, get up and waddle into my chair in front of the Mac.

That’s the start of my day. The kids come after I’ve had a few chuckles at the expense of my local daily newspaper, the former source of my daily fix of comics.

Daily Comics is a free Dashboard Widget, the way God intended Widgets to be. But it’s not the only comic game in town.

If all you need is Dilbert, then you’ll like the GetDilbert Widget from Andrew Hedges.

SayCheese is an older Dashboard Widget that looks similar, though more colorful, than Daily Comics. SayCheese works in a similar manner, too. It lets you select daily comics from a list, and it automatically downloads the comics each day.

Once there was a day when I enjoyed reading the Sunday paper for the comics, and looked forward to the newspaper landing in the morning, because I knew I would get a chuckle from the comics.

I still get that chuckle, and another one—knowing the greedy newspaper people are not getting my money.