We don't talk much about OS X dashboard widgets here. Honestly, most of them aren't worth talking about. iStat pro is a little different, though: this freeware widget is actually useful. It's one-stop shopping for everything you want to know about your system at a glance, from uptime, to capacities and usage for all your disks, to battery health--in addition to charge, of course--for your laptop, to network throughput, to ips for all your network adapters. There's the usual stat geekery as well: uptime, load average, cpu%, and a "processes" section that basically heads the first five or so items from top for that quick stat fix. If you're on a PPC machine, there are some additional features, including processor temp and fan speed monitoring.

The 3.1 update released yesterday adds improved support for iDisk stats, the "Battery Health" section, the ability to hide widgets from the processes list--you already knew Dashboard was a CPU hog--and assorted bug fixes.