The Dashboard

We are now going to present and analyze in great detail another tool that features Mac OS X Dashboard. What is the Dashboard? In essence it is a semi-transparent screen that is invoked when you place in front of all windows of any running applications. On this screen you can POSITION semi-transparent, and configure widgets which can be compared to the small independent applications that perform a particular function.

To enable the dashboard we can, or try spotlight or its application through pressing the F4 key on your keyboard that enables the display of the default dashboard. To customize the activation of this instrument is sufficient to open the System Preferences menu to stop in to Exposé and Spaces on and set the desired button. Relying on the dashboard you will get a screen like this (since you can customize the widgets, the default does not have some widgets shown in the screenshot below):

Every object you see in the screenshot is a widget. The dashboard as well as being a nice graphical tool to use, can be very useful if you configure with appropriate widgets. The first customization that could be useful is to move inside the dashboard widgets that are present by default and to do so, simply click on the widget and, holding down, move it to the desired position.

Within the Dashboard are already installed by default but other widgets are not shown on the screen. To see the list of widgets pre-installed, simply click on the following icon located in the lower left of the dashboard:

Appear in the lower part of the dashboard, a set of widgets that can be used as you can see in schreenshot follows:

To insert one of these widgets on your dashboard just click on it and drag it to the desired position. At this point, the widget will be added to the dashboard and will be shown whenever the dashboard opens. Certainly, clicking on the icon to display more of the list of available widgets, you will notice that the widgets already integrated in the dashboard appeared an x in the top left:

It 'just click right on the x to remove a widget from the dashboard. Obviously, if you accidentally delete a widget, you can re-enter it by going to search for in the list of installed widgets.

Of course you can add widgets to the list of widgets available only by downloading from the Internet, we see how. Also clicking on the lower left corner you will see, next to it, the appearance of a button that when clicked manage widgets will create the following menu, which in turn is a widget:

By clicking on the button at the bottom of other widgets will automatically open the browser will show a page reached from here .

To download a new widget, simply click on the following icon placed after the description of the widget:

It 'just agree to download the widget now and wait for the download to complete. The downloaded file is a file type. Wdgt.zip where the first extension indicates the file is a widget and the second which is a compressed file. So let's double click the downloaded file to unzip it to get the widget itself, which we will install. Again, the installation of the new widget, turns out to be trivial as you just click once on the widget and click on install the installation window that appears:

After a few seconds will be automatically invoked in the dashboard where you will find just installed the new widget.

• <<Previous Lesson
• Help Index
• Next Lesson>>