“Apple has quietly disabled Dashboard by default in the seventh beta of OS X El Capitan, an unsurprising move given the ten-year-old widget feature on Mac has not been updated in over four years and looks increasingly poised for retirement,” Joe Rossignol reports for MacRumors. “Dashboard was similarly disabled by default on OS X Yosemite.”
“The feature can be re-enabled by opening System Preferences > Mission Control and choosing ‘As Space’ from the Dashboard drop-down menu,” Rossignol reports. “Then, tap on the Dashboard key on your keyboard to bring up the window.”
Rossignol reports, “Dashboard was introduced on OS X Tiger in 2005…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: For the heck of it, on one of our Yosemite Macs, we just fired up Dashboard… for the first time this year.
Is anybody going to miss Dashboard?
What’s Dashboard 😉
How can I miss the dashboard in my car?
I use it all the time. I was surprised to see it not there after I installed the latest beta of El Capitan. It returned when I clicked on the Dashboard icon in my dock.
I will be sorry to see it depart.
I love Dashboard. If they ever get rid of it, I’m going to send daily complaints.
Me too. Yes, I LOVE Dashboard and use it everyday. Ridiculous to remove it. I still lament the removal of Window Shade since OS 9 and use Windomizer now instead. Just because you can remove, doesn’t mean you should.
I use it occasionally. Calculator, weather widget, stock monitoring, translation, currency converter… …and hope it sticks around a few more iterations.
Still the handwriting seems on the wall, so get the RIPs ready in time…
No – Not going to miss – will have to find a new Yoda translator… LOL
New widget, you will.
Should become an iOS Layer… Run your iOS Apps in Dashboard.
Excellent idea. iOS apps get updated fairly often while most developers have forgotten the dashboard exists. Most of the widgets I started using years ago have turned into abandonware. I can get a lot more done on my iPhone than I can get done in the dashboard.
Use it for translations, dictionary/thesaurus and conversions.
But that’s it.
(IMO it’s worth keeping just for that.)
I use it every day, and know quite a few people who do. Most common widgets are, of course, weather, but also calculator and unit conversion (as expats living in America, where things are in various disparate units, such as miles, feet, inches, ounces, pints, quarts, gallons, etc., life is normal again when there is a widget that converts all that stuff into metric). Dashboard was a godsend when it appeared over ten years ago and is still a godsend. Of the is x features of various levels of utility, I’d rather lose the following (before dashboard): mission control, launchpad, notepad, stickies, reminder, FileVault, Automator, spaces, cover flow, boot camp…
one of the things about english units that is easier is an ounce (volume) of water weighs an ounce. metric needs two different words with different prefixes for equivalences. also there are finer gradations in the english system, multiples of two works better than multiplying by 1,000 in many cases. i say all this as an american of irish descent with no love for the english!
I was away and out of coverage, so this is beating a long dead horse, but I’ll add it in, perhaps someone will see it.
While multiples of two may work better, humans have ten fingers (unfortunately), so all of our numbering logic is based on multiples of ten. Moving the decimal point is certainly much more effortless than multiplying by two (or twelve, or 3600, or whatever arbitrary number necessary in order to get feet in a mile, inches in a foot, etc).
My most simple common example of the superiority of metric system: how much extra fuel can you carry in a small airplane, will it fit in the cargo hold, and how much would it weigh? If the dimensions of that cargo hold are 3ft long by 3ft high by 3ft tall, how many gallons of fuel would that space fit, and how many pounds would it weigh? In metric, that would be 1m x 1m x 1m = 1 cubic metre, which fits 1,000 litres of fuel, which weighs approximately 1,000 kg (or 1 ton), which is too heavy fro a small airplane. The metric math was done in seconds, with almost no re-calculation. Even if I had the numbers in my head for gallons-to-cubic feet (or inches) and pounds-to-gallons, the math would still take a lot of time, and without the help of a calculator, even longer…
As for gradations, you’d need to go into fractions of English units in order to match common metric ones (such as cm and mm); not to mention that even below mm, you still have µm, so you don’t need to go into decimals (or worse, fractions).
After 24 years of living in America (and surviving under the Imperial system of measurements), I have yet to see a single instance where it has practical advantage over the metric system.
As someone born in the US but earning a living in a lab for decades, I swear by metric! Units of distance are more ingrained as feet and miles but volume, weight and smaller units of length make far more sense as metric. I prefer ºF just because of the smaller gradations but can deal with ºC just as easily.
The 3785 in my name is ml/gal (minus the stuff beyond the decimal) just in case you didn’t notice. 🙂
Lose FileVault2, Boot Camp, and Automator before Dashboard?! That’s nuts! Without FileVault and Boot Camp, there would be far fewer Macs in the enterprise.
I use it daily. CNN widget just stopped working, but I use the stock widget, various weather and other news widgets several times a day.
I use Dashboard all the time. Checking weather around places, quick stock and money view, dictionary, international clock and more. I understand that with iOS mobile, this is kind redundant. But not so easy as on my desktop. Completely useful.
and it was much more appealing when it was an overlay over your regular desktop. When Spaces were introduced, they made dashboard a separate space by default. For now, in Yosemite, you can still turn this off, but it will be quite annoying if they forced the dashboard into its own space (let alone if they eliminated it).
I use it all the time for the stocks widget and weather for multiple locations – very quick and handy.
Glad to see El Capitan still supports it.
And to the person behind MDN (Presumably, Steve Jack), you should try dashboard before proclaiming it obsolete. There is nothing yet that successfully replaces its functionality and utility.
Apple f***s up again. I have five information widgets that I check on multiple times daily, including iStat Pro that gives me system wide information. Simple and elegant. What will my choices be if dashboard goes away completely? Five different apps or a mix of apps and web sites?
I use the Dashboard. I place four fingers on my trackpad and slide to the right, and there it is! I use it to check the time in 5 time zones; currency conversion; quick access to a calculator; units conversion; and the weather in 4 cities simultaneously.
For what it’s worth I use Launcher by
I use the Junecloud tracking widget daily. Syncs with my iPhone
Dashboard is part of the Mac as far as I’m concerned. Radar in Motion is my most important widget, but it’s also the handiest dictionary & calculator I have. Infinitely more convenient than the Notifications drag.
First thing I do when I sit down at my Mac every day is Option-click the Notification icon in the menubar to silence it. I just don’t want to have notifications flying out at me.
I use it multiple times a day for package tracking, weather and stock quote checks and calendar. I don’t want to ever see it go away!
I use it all the time. My standard apps are world clocks (I have 8-9 for US East, Central and Western times, Sydney, London, Copenhagen, Israel, Brisbane, Tokyo) and I use the translation tool (I have 2 copies: English to xxx and xxx to English) plus stocks and calculator.
I would definitely miss it.
Windows Vista and 7 copied Dashboard with their Gadgets but I always liked how Windows did let you pin your Gadgets on the desktop. I never liked Apple’s Dashboard because you had to click into it to see or use important Widgets. There were third-party mods to free Widgets and let you pin them freely on the desktop, but that should have been a feature from the start. Widgets were supposed to be methods to show you quick tidbits of information at a glance but when Apple hides them away and prevents you from placing them where you want to, I think people just forget they existed.
I won’t miss Dashboard. Haven’t used it in years. Even Microsoft gave up on Gadgets rather quickly after Windows 7 released. Looks like Notification center is the new fad lately, but there’s hardly anything on the App Store for it either.
I’ve never used it. Bye!
I use it everyday, everyday. It’s where I have my envelope printing utility, the fastest way to check the temperature in my favorite cities, and quickly do conversions. I love it. I don’t have it as a separate space though. I just have it set to a hot corner. I hope it doesn’t go away!
I use Dashboard all the time. It is connected to one of my “hot corners” so i just mouse to the top right corner of my screen and the widget pop up and overlay on the screen. Its very good for quick information, like weather, unit conversions, currency exchange rates, calendar, translator, dictionary and system into. I hate it if they removed dashboard completely. I actually think if they updated it and had new widgets developed for it now it would be even better than it is now.
I kinda saw this coming though since i haven’t noticed in new apps or updates in years.
I use the MacDailyNews dashboard. Without it, I’d never enter the blog….
But I have to admin, I use less dashboards every time….
I use dashboard about 50 times a day. Where are my packages, what’s the weather, how’s the market doing, is there storms in the area, how many ounces in a gallon, calculator. One of my most used features in OS X
Dashboard is great for small utilities. I use it frequently.
I use the lovely dashboard multiple times daily.
Updates are quite manic on IOS, so the lack of them on dashboard is a plus for me.
I use Dashboard every day. I have a few widgets that display information that I want to see from time to time, and I love the easy mouse click on the icon in the dock way to bring it up.
I will probably be one who re-energises it.
smp
This is old news. Dashboard was disabled by default in Yosemite.
HA! I didn’t know that – I guess since I simply upgrade from one version of the OS to the next, then Dashboard stayed active for me after I upgraded to Yosemite and then again to Mavericks?
smp
I use the radar map and the weather map for national temps all the time plus the shipping tracker. I also like having individual weather widgets for the 6 or so places I visit frequently just to keep tabs on. It’s a great place for things like that. I’ll miss it.
I think dashboard, with the cool widgets, became iOS. It came out a couple years before the iPhone. I like it but it seems out of place in OS X. I’d like to see the fusion of OS X and iOS
I found that I was using Dashboard less and less frequently, and using apps like iStat Pro, Translate, Weather… and that’s about it.
After a while, I stopped caring about iStat, and replaced it with SMCFanControl, which the only thing I was concerned about was fan speed and processor temperature, and the other apps I ignored because I just went to Google for.
Dashboard eventually became an unwanted background process that consumed resources.
Is anybody going to miss Dashboard? No.
Sad. I use it to keep track of woot, stocks, sports scores and weather. I check it a few times a day. I plan to re-enable and keep using it as long as I can. Now getting rid of Launchpad would mean nothing to me. That is the dumbest feature in my mind.
I din’t use Dashboard often, but I do use it from time to time – and apparently, to my surprise, lots of other people do too.
However, I always wondered why Apple, and this was on Steve’s watch, made Dashboard as a separate “layer”, with very little integration with the rest of the OS – copying and pasting info from DashBoard to any OS app was and is a big PIA.
I’ve also wondered why with the constant complaints and subsequent slow return of pre-OS X features like labels and others never included a call for the return of Desk Accessories – mini-apps (think Widgets) that were run from the Apple menu and floated above desktop apps allowing easy launch and use within the OS, i.e. easy to copy/paste.
As others have mentioned, there are apps, like Amnesty, that allow Widgets to be run without invoking the DashBoard. This is a vast improvement, integrating Widgets directly within the OS instead of the limbo of DashBoard.
For anyone who still thinks Steve Jobs never erred in user interface design, DashBoard is just one of many examples where he did. I’m not saying he designed it, but he had ultimate say over OS features and this is one should have been nixed from the start, in my opinion. The Desktop Accessory paradigm was functional, useful and a beloved part of the pre-OS X Mac experience, and did not deserve the ultimate fate it received.
As a side-note, the ability to run iOS apps in Dashboard would have been a great addition, and would still be a brilliant addition.
Cheers,
dmz
PS: I can’t believe how many comments this topic has elicited!
Use the iStat Pro widget all the time. Keeps tabs on memory allocation, CPU usage, internal temperatures, network activity, and storage usage all in a single quick view. Also convenient views for weather and sports headlines.
Yes, I occasionally fire up the iStat Pro widget to check my uptime. TV guide widget is handy also.
I would absolutely miss the Dashboard. I use it for keeping a few clocks in timezones where my clients and contractors are located. I keep track of my deliveries in Delivery Status. I use the stocks widget. I would probably use the flight tracker if there was an app on my iPhone for it to sync with.