OS X Mountain Lion: The Missing Manual

Dashboard

As you know, the essence of using a computer is running programs, which often produce documents. In 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

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 Mountain 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 ...