Depending on how many Desktop Spaces you have, if you swipe three fingers on your Mac’s trackpad to the right a few times, you’ll end up in .
Surprised? Did you forget about it? Or maybe, for new Mac users that is a new thing altogether.
Introduced with much fanfare in OS X Tiger in 2005, Dashboard’s initial goal was to give users an easy way to check the weather, take notes, check the time in different timezone and in general free users from complex applications to achieve simple tasks. The widgets, developed in a mix of HTML, CSS and JavaScript were meant to be small applications, that consume only a small amount of CPU.
In Mountain Lion, Apple further developed Dashboard by allowing users to arrange Widgets in folders similar to iOS, and to access it as a Space instead of a semitransparent layer on top of the current working space.
In OS X Mavericks, Apple hasn’t given much love to this almost forgotten application and even the Dashboard page on the Apple website seems in need of a revamp.
The default Widgets are still Weather, Calculator, Calendar, Contacts, Dictionary, ESPN, Flight Tracker, Movies, Stickies, Stock, Tile Game, Translation, Unit Converter, Web Clip, World Clock and Ski Report. In case you want to get new Widgets you can find them on .
I have to admit to not having touched Dashboard in months, but it was a pleasure to rediscover this forgotten part of OS X. If you don’t need highly customizable applications and don’t want to spend money on them try Dashboard and maybe download one of the thousands still available from Apple. For example, I have discovered that the Translation widget is pretty good and don’t use Google Translate. In a similar fashion, the Unit Converter is extremely useful if you don’t want to use a complex app.
Have you ever used Dashboard? Still do?
I love dashboard! I hope Apple never removes it. As a pilot in a one page glance I can see winds, temperature, approaching weather fronts, prognostic charts, turbulence..without switching pages. One page has it all. I also check my stocks and movies. Using Safari I make my own widgets. It’s what the iPad needs.
Thanks Rick. Wow, this is a great contribution, it never occurred to me that Dashboard should behave like a dashboard (lowercase), with all the info you need in one single page. There are obviously some good uses for this application, and you use case proves it. Thanks!
I pretty much use it every day….stocks, translator, weather radar, clocks (east and west coast), scientific calculator, iStat, movies….
It’s a great place for the TV Guide too!
Thanks for your comment Fred. It seems that Dashboard is used by a bunch if people, more than I thought. Is there any Widget that you couldn’t live with?
ambrosia’s envelope widget, brilliant.
Is it this one?
Thanks for the suggestion, I hope other readers can benefit from it.
I use it for the sticky notes widget and iStat but not much else. They should really show it some love though. I’m in Yosemite beta, and the entire UI is changed, but Dashboard is still over there looking like it did in Mountain Lion.
Dashboard is still there eh? Interesting.
I am not running Yosemite beta and didn’t really investigate, but I thought that with gadgets in notification centre, Dashboard was EOL. Thanks for your contribution!