Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Dashboard
CHAPTER 3 USING SPOTLIGHT, EXPOSÉ, SPACES, AND DASHBOARD 47
The final nifty Leopard feature we’ll talk about in this chapter is Dashboard. Dashboard is an
interface feature that, when activated, will bring forward a number of user-selectable widgets. A
widget is a small, simple application that can do various things. Leopard ships with a number of
widgets that can display the current time, give you the latest movie schedule for you area, control
iTunes, and do much more.
By default, you activate Dashboard with the F12 key. When you do this, the active widgets
will slide into view over your current desktop view (Figure 3-15).
Figure 3-15. Dashboard active with default widgets
To add a widget to your Dashboard, you can click the + sign in the lower-left corner of the
screen when the Dashboard is active. That will open the widget bar across the bottom of the
screen that contains all the Dashboard widgets currently installed (Figure 3-16). To add any of
the installed widgets, select them and drag them off the bar onto the desktop. To remove a
widget, click the X on the top-left of any widget when the widget bar is open. To move a widget,
just click it and move it around to wherever you want, and it will reappear in your selected location
each time you activate Dashboard.
NOTE Holding the Opt key while mousing over a widget will also reveal its Close (X) button.
In addition to the widgets included with Leopard, many, many other widgets are available
to download and install. A good place to look is www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/. If you
download a widget in Safari, it will usually recognize the file as a widget and ask you whether
you’d like to install it. To manually install a widget, just stick it in your ~/Library/Widgets folder
(you may need to create this folder if it doesn’t exist). Once it’s installed, it will be available from
the widget bar. You can uninstall widgets by moving them out of the Widget folder. You can also
deactivate widgets using the Manage Widgets widget that presents a list of all the installed widgets
with check boxes that can be unchecked to deactivate any widgets.