Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Dashboard

As you know, the essence of using Mac OS X is running programs, which often produce documents. In Mac OS X, however, there’s a third category: a set of weird, hybrid entities that Apple calls widgets. They appear, all at once, on a virtual desktop—the leftmost of the ones in Mission Control.

Note

Lion Watch: Apple thought that parking the Dashboard widgets on their own little virtual screen was a convenient place to keep them. They do, after all, feel like they constitute a separate little software world.

But if you prefer the old Way of the Dashboard, where widgets appeared in front of whatever window you have open, open →System Preferences. Click Mission Control, and then turn off “Show Dashboard as a space.” From now on, Dashboard widgets appear as a constellation of little app windows on top of whatever else you were doing, just as they did in the pre-Lion days.

Here, for example, is how you can find them:

• If your F4 key bears the Dashboard logo (), press it.

  Note

  On the very newest Macs, F4 bears a Launchpad icon () instead. On the very oldest Lion-capable Macs, the Dashboard keystroke is usually F12. Or, on laptops where F12 is the key, you have to hold down the Fn key (lower-left ...