OS X Mountain Lion For Dummies

Putting Widgets on the Dashboard

Dashboard offers a way-cool set of widgets, Apple’s name for the mini-applications that live inside the Dashboard layer. You see, Dashboard takes over your screen when you invoke it (as shown in Figure 3-6) by clicking Dashboard’s Dock icon or pressing its keyboard shortcut: F4 on newer Mac keyboards or F12 (or fn+F12) on almost any Mac keyboard. In Figure 3-6, Dashboard is shown with just a few of its default widgets: Calculator, Weather, World Clock, and Calendar.

Figure 3-6: Dashboard lives in its own gray overlay layer.

Widgets are small, single-function applications that work only within Dashboard. Some widgets talk to applications on your hard drive, such as Address Book and iCal. Other widgets — such as Flight Tracker, Stocks, Movies, and Weather — gather information for you via the Internet.

The following tips can help you work with widgets:

Each time you invoke Dashboard, widgets that were open the last time you used it will be on your screen.

To close an open widget, click the minus sign-in-a-circle in the lower-left corner of the screen ...