Here's a skin to improve that hideous Dashboard calculator

The orange edges don't match each other (look at the bottom corners!), the gray box behind the keys is ugly, and the number contrast is poor! How did Apple let that poor craftsmanship out the door? There... that's out of my system

So FWIW, I whipped up this easy-to-install fix. It still has the orange scheme, just cleaned up. And the buttons and numbers are unchanged by this--it's just a single file that changes the calculator body (including making the screen "brighter" for readability).

Try at your own risk... I expect it will work well, but I don't have Tiger running yet so I can't test it yet myself!

Just Show Package Contents on the calculator widget, and drop the attached file "Calculator.png" into the "Images" folder. (And back up your widget first! Who knows what future updates might be confused by the change, so you might want to do this with a copy of the widget.)

If I have the image name or size wrong or anything, please post. I also wouldn't mind seeing before/after screenshots so I know how it works!

If people want I can easily post alternate colors of the same.

Same here!

At first I thought, "why the needless wild colors and shapes?" But the bright colors and unusual shapes serve a purpose! Dashboard summons ALL your chosen widgets at once--and then you must single out the one you want. You can do so instantly because they are so visually distinctive from each other. That's good UI design--and since Dashboard is separate from other windows, and usually hidden, visual variety here does not equal annoying clutter.

It's as though each widget IS its own icon in a way--in the sense of an icon as a visual cue to locate a function.

So I kept the basic orange concept of the Apple calculator--which I no longer hate--and just improved (to my eye) the slightly-off implementation.

Plus I wanted to be a Tiger developer

Glad it works

Sometime I'd like to add a buttons for Copy, Paste, and one to launch the full calculator (preferably with the number transferred)... but I don't know how doable that would be.

Cool I didn't know the LCD would be a separate image--so with a few choices of those you could mix and match...

Maybe Apple's badly-crafter calculator was a blessing in disguise. The other widgets could be skinned but it's the calculator that really caught my eye as needing some help!

The buttons clearly have 2-3 images each: up, down, and for operatiors (like + and -) an "active state" highlighted as it waits for the next number.

The digits may be in some font, but even if so, the font color should be controllable in the JavaScript.

There should be one that's blank, maybe inside a folder. I'm guessing it's called "Calculator.png" and is inside an "Images" folder. Nobody has posted that I got that wrong, but I could have--dig around and see, and if the details aren't what I've said I'll correct my post.

But as was noted above, there are other images in there too. Maybe the one you're looking at with numbers already on it is just the drag-image for when you first drag it out of the widget bar? Or maybe it's the widget's icon that shows in the bar?