OS X Mountain Lion Bible

Touring OS X's Included Widgets

OS X comes with 16 preinstalled widgets from Apple and other providers, covering a variety of functions, from information display to calculators.

Calculator

The Calculator widget is a simple arithmetic calculator—not nearly as powerful as the Calculator application covered in Chapter 9. If you need to use a calculator often, you'd do better to add the Calculator application to your Dock for easy access. (Chapter 2 explains how to manage the items in the Dock.)

Calendar

The Calendar widget (called iCal in previous versions of OS X) offers a very simple view of the information in the iCal application. It displays the current date and month, and it lets you move among months using the arrow buttons at the top of the widget window. If you click the name of the month at the top of the widget, the widget displays the current month instead—a quick way to return to the current month.

If you click the big numeral at the left for the current date (or the name of the day above it), a pane slides out listing calendar events for that date. If you click the date number again, the widget collapses so only the date is shown; one more click, and the month view slides back out. You cannot see the events for any day other than the current date.

Contacts

The Address Book widget lets you quickly search the Contacts application. Type all or part of the name, and the widget displays the contact information for that person. You also can scroll through Address Book entries ...