Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

48
CHAPTER 3 USING SPOTLIGHT, EXPOSÉ, SPACES, AND DASHBOARD
Figure 3-16. Dashboard with the widget bar open at the bottom and the Manage Widgets widget
open in the middle of the screen
NOTE Double-clicking a Dashboard widget in the Finder will also install the widget. If you are
an administrator, it will prompt you whether you’d like it installed for yourself or for everyone.
If you are a regular user, it will install it in your Library/Widgets folder.
Using the individual widgets varies from widget to widget; however, many widgets have settings
hidden in them. To check a widget’s settings, mouse over the widget to see whether a small
i appears (usually in one of the corners). Clicking this i will cause the widget to flip over, revealing
the widget information and settings.
In Leopard you can also add web clippings to your Dashboard from Safari. We’ll talk about
web clippings more when we cover Safari in Chapter 10, but as far as Dashboard is concerned,
they generally behave like any other widget.
Summary
NOTE One new, behind-the-scenes feature of Dashboard in Leopard is that all widgets are
run in the same process. Previously, every time you started a widget it would run in its own
process, so if you ran a large number of widgets, you would notice a slowdown on your
computer.
This chapter wrapped up our quick introduction to the basics of Leopard. The next part jumps
into the basic administration of Leopard as well as how to customize Leopard to suit your needs.
We’ll begin by going through System Preferences in the next chapter.