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I would like to start a series where I showcase software that I find useful, normally related to design or the web, but possibly sometimes related to increasing productivity.

The first in this series is Dashalytics. It is a Mac OS X dashboard widget and it gives you instant access to your Google Analytics stats. If you build or administer website, you have probably come across Analytics before. It is a free web-based statistics tracking application for websites. Sign up, paste some code into the bottom of each page you want to track, and watch you stats day by day. Analytics has its problems, but on the whole it is a great application, and free is always good. The problem is that you have to log in every time you want to see your stats, and you password cannot be saved. This doesn’t sound like much, but it decreases productivity, especially when you like to check your stats regularly, or are monitoring traffic after a certain event. This is where Dashalytics comes in. Press F12 on your mac, and the main stats are there for you to see instantly. And this widget is seriously, lickably, pretty.

As you can see, laid out in a very user friendly way are your unique visitors and page views by hour, day and month, with simple bar graphs to compare. Just what you need on a day to day basis. Now I can check my stats regularly, and only go into the actual Analytics site when I need to analyse data, or when I notice from the widget that traffic levels are out of the norm.

If you do use Google Analytics and Mac OS X I would seriously recommend giving Dashalytics a try.