Security concerns aside, these widgets can be useful in a way that often-used tools on your real desktop can be when they're handy. Just find the offending widget in your widgets folder inside the library folder, drag it to the trash, and then under the "Finder" menu, select "Secure Empty Trash" to ensure that you've got rid of it. The good news is that if you get a widget that causes trouble, they're easy to delete. Apple issued a software patch that fixes the installation problem. Someone could conceivably write a malicious program to hijack control of the system.
Part of this concern stemmed from the fact that Dashboard widgets initially would install themselves right after being downloaded, without first asking the user to approve the installation. Typically, Macs have been immune to security threats prevalent in the Windows world.
DASHBOARD WIDGETS FOR MAC FOR MAC
You can also toggle Dashboard on and off by hitting the F12 key on the keyboard.Ĭlick here for ten of the most useful and interesting widgetsĪpple has been encouraging the development of widgets since it first demonstrated the Dashboard feature last year, and at my last count, there were 247 free widgets available for download from the Apple Web site.īut all those widgets may be opening up a troubling can of worms for Mac users. To do that, just click an unoccupied section of the desktop, and they're gone as fast as they appeared.
Just click on the Dashboard icon in the dock, and the widgets materialize until you're ready to put them away. This is different from making Dashboard hover over everything again, because this actually liberates the widgets out of Dashboard turning them into movable objects on the desktop itself. Dashboard, the widgets are easy to grab and put away at will. These widgets are actually from Dashboard, a largely forgotten feature of Mac OS X that can be made useful again by bringing them more to the forefront of your desktop experience.