The idea of the Dashboard with widgets always accessible by a simple swipe of the mouse has been one of the most useful operating system enhancements on the Mac OS X platform to date for me. I use it extensively to store important notes for client work I perform.

The widget I used to use for this, K-Notes, worked well with the exception that it had no undo/redo facility. That means, if I ever accidentally delete text it is gone forever, a big no-no. So I decided to use SecureNotePadPlus, which worked OK until yesterday. See, I was busy performing hard drive wipes on some old disks laying around when one drive decided to hang the IO bus on the laptop. So I had to hard reboot the mac.

This morning when I tried to add some additional notes to the widget application, I found to my horror that I have lost the past week's information. These notes were extremely important, so I tried to perform a time machine restore of the login Keychain (this is where SecureNotePadPlus stores its notes). I cannot tell you how angry I was when I discovered SecureNotePadPlus does not perform regular flushes to disk of the content stored within it. The last entry was dated 8 January, 4 days old. That is, for 4 days that application stored my notes ONLY IN RAM. It never persisted it to disk, because the machine crash only happened on the 12th. Dashboard widgets are designed to persist state transparently. And even if this widget decided not to adhere to those standards, then there should have been a SAVE button so that I can manually commit the data to disk. It does not have one.

I have lost this information for ever. Maybe this post helps someone considering this ridiculous widget. Think twice.