Sticky widgets with Dashboard
When Dashboard was announced at WWDC in June 2004 most people thought it was a rip-off on the application called Konfubulator which made it possible to have widgets on your desktop lying there so you could monitor weather or something else, the thing about those widgets were that they were sticky on the desktop.
Apple has made Dashboard to work like widgets in Exposé style, press F12 to instantly show them, check your widgets and then press F12 to instantly go back where you were doing at the moment. This tip makes it possible to have a widget on your desktop without the need to have your Dashboard active.
How-to do it?
1. Press F12 to activate Dashboard or press the Dashboard icon in the dock.
2. Press the + button to get access to the widgets menu where you can add more widgets onto dashboard.
3. Choose a widget you want to have on your desktop and then drag it to the screen without releasing it and then press F12 again to come back out of Dashboard
4. As you can see your widget is still with you and now release the button and you can use the widget on your desktop without having Dashboard active.
The widget on the desktop will go back to Dashboard if you press F12 and disappear from the desktop.
This only works with 1 widget at the time.
- Tigerstorm's blog
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However, once you activate
However, once you activate the widgets by pressing F12, they remain active and will utilize RAM and minor CPU regardless of whether or not you are viewing them.
Ron Gallagher
Citrus Studios
Not true...
This just isn't true, as far as I know. The widgets are pure HTML/CSS/JS for one, so I don't see how they'd be using *that* much RAM anyway, but more to the point, the widgets only activate/update when you activate Dashboard.
This can be seen by the fact that on slower Macs (read, mine) the clock only updates it's time after dashboard has been active for a second or so.
Regards,
Nick Stenning
Activity Monitor
If you run your activity monitor, you will notice each widget uses resources. Weather and Stoks seem to use the most, ranging from 8-12MB.
If you check your Activity Monitor before activiating the widgets, you will notice they are not listed. Once must remeber Java Script is a technology used - it will use resources. From what I have seen thus far, Widgets will continue to remain active. Just because you cannot see them, does not mean they are inactive.
Ron Gallagher
Citrus Studios
There's actually an
There's actually an "official" way to do this.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050422172929402
A bit more predictable, is all.
It's the same..
It's the same thing..
Bah!
Close.
The OS X Hints article shows you how to enable debug mode:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YESFollowed by a logout-login.
Only yours is slightly
Only yours is slightly useless. If you need to call up dashboard for any reason, the widget will dissappear.
I like it
While I wish Apple would just allow any number of widgets to be on the desktop, I know that "Amnesty" allows this ( http://www.mesadynamics.com/amnesty.htm )... I think it's cool to have at least one open as I think the iTunes widget is superior to the minimized iTunes controller. If for no other reason, I like this little bit of info to do this.