In macOS Catalina, Apple has killed off the Dashboard, and at least one person will miss it dearly.
Apple had telegraphed earlier this summer that Dashboard was about to meet its end, but that didn’t make the news any easier for me, the only person I know who was using the feature every day.
Dashboard was a sort of second desktop that you could populate and customize with simple programs, called widgets. It launched with 14 basic options developed by Apple, including Weather, Dictionary, World Clock, Calendar, and Calculator widgets. One of my favorites was Stickies—floating yellow boxes that you could type notes into and “stick” onto your desktop. Another joy of widgets: Outside developers could make them, too. An entire ecosystem cropped up…
It wasn’t anything flashy, but I found it useful to have all of these tools in one place just a keyboard shortcut away.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, memories, of a feature we never used. Longtime Mac users never really embraced the Dashboard. Yes, we knew it was there and how to get to it (and we even made a MacDailyNews widget for it way back when), but the Dashboard was never something we ever got in the habit of using.
Dashboard fans: use the “Today” tab within your Mac’s Notification Center to replace your Dashboard widgets. There are more available via the Mac App Store. Just search for “Notification Widgets.”