In a way, fetching the smartphone to check things like the weather forecast, the status of a package that I should receive soon, or to make a calculation or unit conversion, is less disruptive of the workflow I’m having on the Mac than having an overlay or a dedicated space within the Mac UI itself.īut putting my habits aside for the moment, let’s focus on how widget management could work on the Mac, as it’s a good UI exercise.
Ironically enough, for many quick tasks and quick information retrieval, the iPhone has become the tangible desk accessory. The usefulness of Dashboard and the concept of the ‘desk accessory’ or widget started waning for me as soon as I got my first iPhone in 2008.
The Dock in iPhone OS was basically the Dashboard ‘dock’ in its first iterations. In a sense, when the iPhone’s user interface was demoed in January 2007, one of the things that made me instantly love it is that certain apps and interactions fondly reminded me of Dashboard widgets. I used Dashboard and its widgets quite a lot in the Tiger-Leopard era. I remember spending quite a lot of time perusing the Dashboard widgets page on Apple’s website to look for more widgets to add to my collection.
#How to add widgets to dashboard mac os x mac os x#
I remember being excited and fascinated by Dashboard when it made its debut back then with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Bringing back Dashboard is an obvious solution here, and I’d love to see it make a return. Anything older is hidden behind a button, regardless of how many widgets you may have in the lower section of the Notification Center columnĪpple needs to rethink this and let this new class of widgets breathe, being able to use the entire screen like the widgets of yore could.
#How to add widgets to dashboard mac os x pro#
Even on a Pro Display XDR, you get three visible notifications. Sadly, they all got stuffed into the slide-out Notification Center user interface
Just one year after Catalina killed Dashboard, Apple started allowing developers to bring their iOS widgets over to the Mac in macOS Big Sur. In a recent post, Apple Should Bring Back Dashboard, Stephen Hackett expresses his wish for Dashboard to make a reappearance in Mac OS:Īpple killed off Dashboard at exactly the wrong time.
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