A fun way to customize the Mac desktop is to add floating widgets for things like weather, ski conditions, stocks, and time. These widgets are actually from Dashboard, a largely forgotten feature of OS X that can be made useful again by bringing them more to the forefront of your desktop experience. This is different … Read More

Dashboard got a user interface overhaul with OS X Mountain Lion and it now more closely resembles, surprise surprise, iOS and OS X’s very own Launchpad. You’ll find the new look when you go to add a widget to the Dashboard, and just like iOS you can now arrange all those widgets into Folders to … Read More

Don’t like Dashboard much in Mac OS X Lion? If changing Dashboards background wallpaper wasn’t enough for you, you can always return it to the standard transparent hovering state that existed prior to OS X 10.7 Lion. This pulls Dashboard widgets out of their own space in Mission Control and shows widgets directly over the … Read More

Since the launch of Mac OS X Lion, all keyboards on new Mac products have replaced F4 with a ‘LaunchPad’ button instead of the old Dashboard button. If you have pre-Lion Mac, you can remap that F4 Dashboard button to open LaunchPad instead though, here’s how:

Mac OS X Lion brought a few changes to the Dashboard, one being that it’s contained within it’s own Space by default, and the other noticeable UI difference is the new Lego lookalike background wallpaper that looks a little, well, Lego-like. That background image is easy to change, so pick an image you’d rather see … Read More

Mac OS X has a fancy way of refreshing your Dashboard widgets. It’s better watched than described or shown in pictures, so open up Dashboard, click on any widget, then hit Command+R and watch the widget disappear and reappear into a twirl. The larger and more colorful the widget the better the effect, and you … Read More

A new patent has been discovered that details a revised Dashboard system in Mac OS X that allows for multiple Dashboard environments and a new method of managing widgets. On the surface, that might not seem too exciting since Dashboard has been around for ages, but when you look at the patent diagrams, see the … Read More

If only the Mac OS X Dashboard weather widget could tell us the weather in distant galaxies far, far away from famous science fiction movies… wouldn’t that be nice? If you enjoy Star Wars, you’ll probably enjoy these images from Cristian Kit Paul, a graphic designer who also must be a Mac user and Star … Read More

One of Mail’s many talents (this one does not require a plugin) is the ability to automatically detect when a flight number is present and then give you the option to view the status using the flight tracking Dashboard widget. You don’t have to do much to utilize this tip, just next time you receive … Read More

Hey look it’s raining out of the snow! That’s something I don’t see everyday. You can cycle through all the possible weather graphics in the Dashboard Weather Widget by hitting the Command+Option keys and clicking on the main weather icon, which changes the location to ‘nowhere’, keep clicking and you’ll see different weather graphics. Some … Read More