Dashboard is a discontinued feature of
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
's
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
operating systems, used as a secondary desktop for hosting mini-applications known as
widgets. These are intended to be simple applications that do not take time to launch. Dashboard applications supplied with macOS included a stock ticker, weather report, calculator, and notepad; while users could create or download their own.
Before
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, when Dashboard is activated, the user's desktop is dimmed and widgets appear in the foreground. Like application windows, they can be moved around, rearranged, deleted, and recreated (so that more than one of the same Widget is open at the same time, possibly with different settings). New widgets can be opened, via an icon bar on the bottom of the layer, loading a list of available apps similar to the iOS homescreen or the macOS
Launchpad
A launch pad is an above-ground platform from which rocket- missiles or space launch vehicles take off vertically.
Launch pad may also refer to:
Computing
* Launchpad (macOS), an application launcher introduced in Mac OS X Lion
* Launch Pad (s ...
. After loading, the widget is ready for use.
Dashboard was first introduced in
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
It can be activated as an application, from the Dock, Launchpad, or Spotlight. It can also be accessed by a
dashboard key. Alternatively, the user can choose to make Dashboard open on moving the cursor into a preassigned hot corner or keyboard shortcut. Starting with
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, the Dashboard can be configured as a
space
Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider ...
, accessed by swiping four fingers to the right from the Desktops either side of it.
From
OS X 10.10 Yosemite onward, the Dashboard was disabled by default, with the
Notification Center
Notification Center is a feature in iOS and macOS that provides an overview of alerts from applications. It displays notifications until the user completes an associated action, rather than requiring instant resolution. Users may choose what a ...
becoming the primary method of displaying widgets. As of
macOS 10.15 Catalina, Dashboard has been removed from macOS.
Widget functions and capabilities
Dashboard widgets, like web pages, are capable of many different things, including of performing tasks that would be complicated for the user to access manually. One example is the
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
Search widget, which simply opens up the user's
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
and performs a Google search. Other widgets, like Wikipedia, grab the contents of web pages and display them within Dashboard. Some widgets can also serve as games, using
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...
(or another multimedia authoring program) to create games just as if they were in a web browser. It is also possible for Mac users to create their own widgets using built-in software.
Graphics
Dashboard uses a variety of graphical effects for displaying, opening, and using widgets. For instance, a 3-D flip effect is used to simulate the widget flipping around, by clicking on a small ''i'' icon in the right bottom corner, the user can change the preferences on the reverse side; other effects include crossfading and scaling from icon to body (when opening widgets), a "spin-cycle effect" when a widget is focused and the user presses Command-R or a suck-in effect when they are closed. On sufficiently powered Macs, widgets will produce a ripple effect when they are opened, like a leaf falling onto water. These effects consume considerable processing power but with the help of macOS’s
Quartz Extreme
Quartz Compositor is the display server (and at the same time the compositing window manager) in macOS. It is responsible for presenting and maintaining rasterized, rendered graphics from the rest of the Core Graphics framework and other render ...
and
Core Image
Core Image is a pixel-accurate, near-realtime, non-destructive image processing technology in Mac OS X. Implemented as part of the QuartzCore framework of Mac OS X 10.4 and later, Core Image provides a plugin-based architecture for applying fil ...
graphics architectures, sufficient computing power to render them in
real time is available. As with
Exposé
Expose, exposé, or exposed may refer to:
News sources
* Exposé (journalism), a form of investigative journalism
* '' The Exposé'', a British conspiracist website
Film and TV Film
* ''Exposé'' (film), a 1976 thriller film
* ''Exposed'' (1932 ...
,
Front Row and the
minimize effect, holding shift down while calling the Dashboard or opening the Dashboard menu bar will display the effect in
slow motion
Slow motion (commonly abbreviated as slo-mo or slow-mo) is an effect in film-making whereby time appears to be slowed down. It was invented by the Austrian priest August Musger in the early 20th century. This can be accomplished through the use o ...
.
Creation of widgets
Dashboard widgets are created using
Hypertext Markup Language
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript ...
(HTML),
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
(CSS), and
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
. Because the same languages are used for creating
websites
A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikipe ...
, many web
developers can already build them. Widgets themselves are, at the core, simply HTML files that are displayed within the Dashboard layer; they use the
WebKit
WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as on the iOS and iPadOS version of any web browser. WebKit is also used by the BlackBerry Browser, PlayStation consoles beginning from the PS ...
application framework that is also used in Apple's
Safari web browser, meaning even users running earlier versions of macOS — where Dashboard is unavailable — can build them. There is widget
API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
allows the widgets to use Mac-specific interface elements such as the Apple Slider.
When a Dashboard widget is built, it usually consists of six files:
* The widget's HTML file, which is the actual file that will be displayed in the Dashboard layer
* The widget's CSS file, which is used for styling the widget (but is called on from the HTML file)
* The widget's JavaScript file, although it may be implemented directly within the HTML file if the developer desires
* The widget's Property List (called “Info.plist”), which is what Dashboard uses to load the widget’s properties (i.e.: name, version, HTML file, etc.)
* The background image of the widget, in PNG format
* The
icon
An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most ...
that is displayed in the menu bar
Once all of these files are in the root of a directory, it is given a name and the extension ".wdgt", and then it can be opened up in Dashboard as a widget. More complex widgets may also include a
Cocoa
Cocoa may refer to:
Chocolate
* Chocolate
* ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree
* Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao''
* Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...
widget plugin (for platform-specific functionality), one or more JavaScript files (for text scrolling, preferences, etc.) or multiple images (for personalized select menus or buttons).
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard includes an application called
Dashcode
Dashcode was a software application created by Apple Inc. that was included with Mac OS X Leopard and facilitates the development of widgets for Dashboard. It was first included on new MacBooks shipping around the time of May 24, 2006, as part ...
, which is a more user-friendly way of creating widgets. Another new feature of Leopard is called "Web Clip" which lets users easily create widgets from parts of a webpage. For example, during the WWDC 2007 keynote, Steve Jobs made widgets out of the following: the featured news headlines on
Yahoo.com
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...
, the top ten most searched terms on
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
, the Photo of the Day on
National Geographic
''National Geographic'' (formerly the ''National Geographic Magazine'', sometimes branded as NAT GEO) is a popular American monthly magazine published by National Geographic Partners. Known for its photojournalism, it is one of the most widely ...
, the ''
Dilbert
''Dilbert'' is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Scott Adams, first published on April 16, 1989. It is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office with engineer Dilbert as the title charact ...
'' comic strip, and the box office information from
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
. The user can also customize the border to further personalize the widgets.
Comparison with Konfabulator
Many people have made comparisons between
Konfabulator and Apple's Dashboard, especially after Apple announced the feature while
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was in development. It was a subject of debate in the online community following the few months before Tiger's official release.
One school of thought came to the conclusion that Dashboard was a "rip-off" of Konfabulator. It points out the visual and functional similarities between Dashboard has been widely compared to Konfabulator (later
Yahoo! Widget Engine) and sometimes called a copy of it, due to the similarities between their graphical aspects and the fact that they both use the term “widgets” to describe the objects in their environments. Konfabulator may, in turn, have been based on Apple’s
Desk Accessories A desk accessory (DA) in computing is a small transient or auxiliary application that can be run concurrently in a desktop environment with any other application on the system. Early examples, such as Sidekick and Macintosh desk accessories, used s ...
, first released in 1984 with the original
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
. Desk Accessories, similar to widgets, were small mini-applications that operated on a user’s desktop. After the introduction of
System 7
System 7, codenamed "Big Bang", and also known as Mac OS 7, is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers and is part of the classic Mac OS series of operating systems. It was introduced on May 13, 1991, by Apple C ...
and cooperative multitasking, the necessity of creating Desk Accessories was removed and developers were encouraged to create applications instead. The OS continued to support them, for backward compatibility, until the switch to
Mac OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...
(In fact, the Calculator desk accessory remained in the Mac OS through version 9, seventeen years without a significant update).
The codebases for Konfabulator and Dashboard are also different: Konfabulator uses
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...
and
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
to generate Widgets, whereas Dashboard uses
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
,
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
, JavaScript, and
Objective-C
Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTS ...
.
Included widgets
In the first version of Dashboard released with
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger update 10.4.3. Apple included 14 widgets. They consisted of:
*
Address Book
An address book or a name and address book is a book, or a database used for storing entries called contacts. Each contact entry usually consists of a few standard fields (for example: first name, last name, company name, address, telephone n ...
(now known as Contacts)
*
Business
Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for pr ...
*
Calculator
An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics.
The first solid-state electronic calculator was created in the early 1960s. Pocket-sized ...
*
Calendar
A calendar is a system of organizing days. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A date is the designation of a single and specific day within such a system. A calendar is also a physi ...
*
Dictionary
A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...
* Flight Tracker
*
iTunes
iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...
Controller—no longer included in latest
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
releases.
* Phone Book—no longer included in latest
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
releases.
*
Stickies
*
Stocks
* Tile Game
*
Translation
Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...
* Unit Converter
*
Weather
Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmosphere, the ...
* World Clock
After the Macworld 2006 keynote,
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a ...
also announced four new widgets (Ski Report, People Finder, Google Search, and ESPN), as well as significant updates to the Phone Book and Calendar widgets. All of these are available through the Mac OS X 10.4.4 Tiger update.
In addition,
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, released in late 2007, includes new widgets. One of these is Web Clip, which allows any user to turn a rectangular section of any webpage into a widget (This, however, only works with the
Safari web browser). The widget updates as the website does, and all links and other interactive material in the widget's selection of the webpage works as if the website is being accessed from Safari. Another new widget is Movies, which allows users to find currently playing movies at local theaters, view trailers, and purchase tickets directly from Dashboard. In
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion the Phone Book and iTunes Controller widgets were removed
Widgets on iOS
Apple has never announced support for the installation of Dashboard widgets on iOS. Even though, in June 2008, an unannounced update of Dashcode that was packaged with the
iPhone SDK
The iOS SDK (iOS Software Development Kit), formerly the iPhone SDK, is a software development kit (SDK) developed by Apple Inc. The kit allows for the development of mobile apps on Apple's iOS and iPadOS operating systems.
The iOS SDK is a fre ...
allowed for the creation of iPhone-oriented
web widget
A web widget is a web page or web application that is embedded as an element of a host web page but which is substantially independent of the host page, having limited or no interaction with the host. A web widget commonly provides users of the ...
s, it is unknown if this version of Dashcode would support the creation of AJAX-driven
mobile widget
A software widget is a relatively simple and easy-to-use software application or component made for one or more different software platforms.
A desk accessory or applet is an example of a simple, stand-alone user interface, in contrast with a m ...
s that could be installed natively on iOS.
It has been demonstrated that installing Dashboard widgets on a
jailbroken iOS device is possible in theory, but most desktop-oriented widgets are not oriented to usage or interaction on iOS's
multi-touch
In computing, multi-touch is technology that enables a surface (a touchpad or touchscreen) to recognize the presence of more than one somatosensory system, point of contact with the surface at the same time. The origins of multitouch began at CER ...
screen
Screen or Screens may refer to:
Arts
* Screen printing (also called ''silkscreening''), a method of printing
* Big screen, a nickname associated with the motion picture industry
* Split screen (filmmaking), a film composition paradigm in which mul ...
-oriented interface; they may also rely on DashboardClient's ''widget'' JavaScript object, which is not part of iOS.
On June 2, 2014, as part of their announcement of
iOS 8
iOS 8 is the eighth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iOS 7. It was announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 2, 2014, and was released on September 17, ...
, Apple announced that in the "Today" view (which is accessible by swiping down from the status bar) will be able to have downloadable widgets from the App Store.
While not the same desktop-oriented widgets that are found in Dashboard, this represented the first time that widgets became available officially (i.e., without jailbreaking) on iOS.
There is an unrelated
CarPlay
CarPlay is an Apple standard which enables a car radio or head unit to be a display and a controller for an iOS device. It is available on all iPhone models beginning with iPhone 5 running iOS 7.1 or later.
According to Apple's website, all m ...
feature with the same name introduced with
iOS 13
iOS 13 is the thirteenth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. for their iPhone, iPod Touch, and HomePod lines. The successor to iOS 12 on those devices, it was announced at the company's Worldwide Developer ...
.
On June 22, 2020, during the WWDC Keynote Address, Apple introduced widgets for iOS 14. These widgets can be placed on the homescreen, and can be resized. Users can stack up to 10 widgets, or choose a "Smart Stack" widget which will change depending the user's activity.
See also
*
Add-on (Mozilla)
*
Dashboard (business)
In business computer information systems, a dashboard is a type of graphical user interface which often provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to a particular objective or business process. In other usage, "das ...
*
Google Chrome Extensions
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, ...
References
;Notes
"Desk Ornaments"by Andy Hertzfeld, ''folklore.org'', October 1981, retrieved July 11, 2006
Apple.com
External links
Apple's Dashboard pageDashcode Developer TipsDashboard User TipsDashboard Games
{{macOS
MacOS user interface
Widget engines
Software based on WebKit