“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?
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.