Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) saw the introduction of Dashboard and Widgets. Dashboard is the name for the holder of the widgets. Widgets are small applications and utilities that perform common tasks and can display information from the Web in a quick matter.

If I am being honest I really do not use widgets all that often. I occasionally use the calculator, use the weather widget and I have downloaded a to do widget which I will review in a future post.

To access your widgets you can either click the Dashboard icon found in your dock or use the key or mouse option that you set in System Preferences. Simply go into System Preferences, select Dashboard and Exposé and choose the appropriate options under the Dashboard section. For myself Dashboard set to launch on F12 (I believe this is the default).

On your first launch of the Dashboard the widgets shown above are the ones available. They are the calculater, calendar, weather and world clock — nothing too fancy but some useful tools depending on how you want to use them.

Mac OS X comes preinstalled with a number of other widgets you may add to the Dashboard and customize as you wish. To add these widgets you need to enter the Widget Manager by clicking on the + symbol in the lower left corner of the screen.

After you enter the Widget Manager your currently installed widgets have X’s present in their upper left corner. These X’s will allow you to remove the widgets from Dashboard.

When in the Widget Manager part of the Dashboard you will also see the above bar at the bottom of the screen. The X closes the Widget Manager. By clicking on one of the widgets it will add it to the Dashboard and you can customize any options available. There are arrows on the left and right side of the screen which will scroll through the widgets that don’t appear in the current line up. It’s actually quite easy to maintain and trying it for yourself is easier than reading about it here.

The first widget you see in the list as well as the Manage Widgets… button opens up a widget to manage widgets. I will discuss this tool as well as how to install widgets in a future post.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Widgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.