Widgets in iOS. This widget should be on every Mac computer How to add widgets to dashboard x

It is no coincidence that this selection of holiday wallpapers was published today. Firstly, today is the eve of Catholic Christmas: there are probably a lot of Russian-speaking Catholics (or those who at least understand Russian). And secondly, next Friday almost everyone will have no time for wallpaper. 🙂 Well, and thirdly, you need to tune in to the New Year’s mood in advance, so that with the first clink of glasses of champagne, there are only joyful thoughts and hopes for the best in your head.

A free Dashboard widget that allows you to create a variety of to-do lists. Thanks to integration with iCal and Apple Mail, it collects all the information the user needs in one place. DoBeDo has a nice simple design and can change the theme.

Not quite a widget, but this program is closely related to Dashboard. The thing is that Dasher is designed for just one simple function, namely, to automatically show the Dashboard after a certain period of time. This is very convenient, because information from widgets can be useful, but sometimes you simply forget to open the Dashboard yourself.

Most Apple computer users who have already installed latest version operating system macOS, after the update we could not find the previously familiar Dashboard panel, on which various widgets are usually located.

Some sources even reported that Apple removed it from new version operating system at all, but this is not true, it’s just that in Mojave it is now disabled by default, and you can return this panel with widgets in just a couple of clicks.

Let us remind you that Dashboard is a program that is displayed as a separate window in macOS and usually goes in front of all desktops. Its main purpose is to arrange various widgets for quick access, such as: weather, calculator, notes, calendar and many others to suit your taste.

However, after installing the latest version of Apple's operating system - Mojave, users did not find their usual window with widgets in its rightful place, and indeed they did not find it anywhere. They searched badly!

Indeed, Apple disabled Dashboard by default in the new version of macOS, considering this tool to be outdated and useless, but as often happens, many did not agree with this opinion and want to return it. And here's how to do it.

In order to enable Dashboard in Mojave do the following:

1. Open system settings.

To do this, click on the “apple” in the upper left corner of the Mac OS screen and select the item from the drop-down menu "System Settings" .

2. Open Mission Control

In the system settings menu that opens, find and open the item called "Mission Control".

3. Customize the Dashboard display

The last thing in the menu that opens is to find the item "Dashboard" and select how you want to display it from the dropdown list. To display it as a separate window, select the item in the list "Like Space".

In general, that’s all, you can close the menu and look for the window with widgets in its usual place. To do this, just click Fn+F9(a list of all desktops will be displayed, including the Dashboard window).

The vast majority of Mac owners have been accumulating clouds of unnecessary notifications from various programs in the notification center for several months now. And the function is really useful, it allows you to perform small actions without launching additional programs, but simply by swiping to the left. The following 10 widgets are designed to make the notification center in OS X Yosemite a little more convenient.

Just Calendar

By default, Apple does not offer you a full-fledged calendar, limiting itself to the standard display of the current date and day of the week. Just Calendar fits perfectly into the concept of minimalism, offering a convenient calendar with basic functionality.

Countdowns

A deadline, a friend’s birthday, another holiday, or even the anniversary of your relationship - all this can be quite easily forgotten in the daily work routine. And waiting for the holidays, counting down the days remaining until them, is doubly pleasant. And these are just a few reasons why you should download free Countdowns now.

Battery Diag

Capacious, long-lasting batteries are one of the advantages of Macbooks. For those who are concerned about the health of their battery, the number of recharge cycles, temperature, initial and current capacity, Battery Diag is best suited. It looks more beautiful than similar programs or Dashboard widgets, and the fact that you can download it for free (limited time) and access information in one swipe is another argument in favor of Battery Diag.

Keypad

This widget uses another cool feature of OS X Yosemite - Continuity mode. Previously, calls could only be made from Facetime, but Keypad adds this capability directly to the notification center. One field for entering a number and three buttons: Call, Redial, Open App is a sufficient minimum for quick and convenient use of this function.

Lyrical

Typically, when you listen to music from iTunes, all that appears in the notification center is the name of the song that is playing and its artist. If that's not enough for you, download Lyrical. It will add not only the cover of the album being played, playback controls, track rating and volume, but also the lyrics of the song.

AirMail

It can rightfully be considered one of the best email clients for OS X. Convenient and beautiful, with the addition of its own widget in the second version it became even better. The functionality is minimal, but it's more than enough to make you forget about the app in the status bar in most situations. Directly in the notification center, the addressee and subject of the message are displayed, which can be opened with a simple click, as well as three buttons: “Reply”, “Send to archive” and “Delete”. The widget is available with the app, which will cost you $10.

iStat Mini

This widget collects up-to-date data on memory, processor, internal storage, and network status. iStat Mini is a minimalistic mini version of iStat for Dashboard. However, this does not prevent him from being useful no less than his older brother.

Swift Note

Swift Note is a small note-taking app for the notification center. It costs a symbolic $1 and will be convenient in cases where you need to save important but short-term information or reminders that do not require launching a full-fledged Calendar or Reminders. You can create an unlimited number of notes and change their colors within six standard options. By the way, a similar widget can be installed in Dashboard.

The vast majority of Mac owners have been accumulating clouds of unnecessary notifications from various programs in the notification center for several months now. And the function is really useful, it allows you to perform small actions without launching additional programs for this, but simply by swiping to the left. The following 10 widgets are designed to make the notification center in OS X Yosemite a little more convenient.

Just Calendar

Countdowns

Battery Diag

Capacious, long-lasting batteries are one of the advantages of Macbooks. For those who are concerned about the health of their battery, the number of recharge cycles, temperature, initial and current capacity, Battery Diag is best suited. It looks prettier than similar programs or Dashboard widgets, and the fact that it can be downloaded for free (for a limited time) and access information in one swipe is another argument in favor of Battery Diag.

Keypad

Lyrical

AirMail

iStat Mini

Swift Note

As you know, Mac OS X's job is to run programs, which often produce documents. Leopard, however, introduced another category of unusual objects that Apple called widgets. If you press the F12 key, they will all appear in front of you at once on top of your other windows. Welcome to the Dashboard shown in Fig. 5.23.

Note On aluminum Apple keyboards To call the Dashboard, use another key: F4. It even has a little Dashboard icon on it. (F12 may still work

You can assign another key instead of this one, as described below. Additionally, on laptops where F12 acts as the Eject key, you need to hold down the Fn key (in the lower left corner).

What exactly are these strange objects? They're not really programs because they don't create documents and don't have Dock icons (although the Dashboard program itself does have a Dock icon). They are clearly not documents because they cannot be named or saved. Most of all they resemble small web pages. They are designed to display information, much of which is taken from the Internet, and are created using web programming languages such as HTML and JavaScript.

Initially, these graphical elements include a calculator, weather report, stock ticker, clock, movie schedule, etc. (You may need to wait about 30 seconds for them to “warm up”, go online and show the correct information.) The initial development of Dashboard is not will take you a lot of time:

To move a widget, drag it where you want. (Click anywhere other than a button, menu, or text field.)

To close a widget, press the Option key while the mouse cursor is over the element. A button will appear in its upper left corner; click on it.

Advice If the widget panel is open (as discussed below), each element has a close button, and Option key will not need.

To open a closed widget, click on the + button located at the bottom of the screen. The entire screen will move up a couple of centimeters to make room for the widget bar - a strip of "perforated metal" containing all the widgets, including those in this moment are not visible on the screen (Fig. 5.24). (Their full list with descriptions are given later in this chapter.) You can open the desired widget by clicking on its icon.

On Macs with the most modern graphic cards Very realistic waves spread out from the newly opened widget, which has “plopped” into the center of the screen. These widgets really know how to make an impression, right?

To hide a widget or remove one you installed yourself, use the Widget described below.

To change the order of the widgets on the panel, open the Drive>Library>Widgets folder. There are icons for the standard widgets of your Dashboard. To swap them, you need to rename them: they appear in alphabetical order on the panel. (If necessary, you can permanently remove the widget by deleting it from this folder.)

Advice The Dashboard icon is also in your Dock, in case you forget that there is an F12 key. On the other hand, if you prefer a key, you can remove this icon from the Dock and make room for more important things. Control-click the icon; In the menu that appears, select Remove from Dock.

Like most Leopard features, Dashboard is packed with cool tips and tricks. Here are a few of the most important ones:

Simply clicking on the icon on the panel will place the widget in the center of the screen. But by dragging the widget icon you can place it anywhere.

There is a wonderful key combination that opens and closes the widget panel: - equal sign (=). (On non-US keyboards, this combination may be different.)

To refresh information in a widget—for example, force it to fetch fresh data from the Internet—click on it and press -R. The widget will immediately curl into some kind of ice cream tube (you have to see it to believe it with your own eyes), and then unfold again and display the new data.

You can open multiple instances of the same widget - just click its icon on the panel several times. As a result, you will get several copies of it on the screen: three clocks, two stock tickers, etc. This is convenient when, for example, you need to know the time and weather in several cities or when you have two different portfolios of securities.

If you hold down the Shift key while calling Dashboard, widgets fly onto the screen with a gorgeous, transparent 3D slow-motion animation. Isn’t it happiness to live until such a time?

To change the Dashboard F12 key to something else, select > System Preferences and click the Expose & Spaces button.

Advice An even faster way is to Control-click the Dashboard icon in the Dock and select Dashboard Preferences from the pop-up menu.

In this window, you can choose almost any combination of keys to open and close the Dashboard, and even make it appear when you move the mouse cursor to a corner of the screen you designate.

Here short description 20 standard widgets installed natively in Leopard. Of course, they look very simple, but some have their own secrets.

This widget is designed to manage all the others (Fig. 5.25). With its help, the easiest way is to hide the widget (that is, remove it from the Dashboard, but leave it on the Mac in case you change your mind later) or remove it from the machine altogether. It performs three functions:

Hide or show widgets. You can hide the ones you never use.

Click the button and delete the widget permanently. Apple widgets cannot be deleted - only those that you downloaded and installed yourself.

Click on More Widgets to view their catalog. You'll be taken directly to Apple's web page, where there are thousands of other widgets available for download. Details below.

Advice You can make Widgets longer or shorter by dragging the ribbed corner at the bottom right.

Address Book

The idea of this widget is to provide faster access to address book. (Open this program Address Book, if you just need to find a number, is too cumbersome.)

The widget looks like an address card, but it has many clickable places. For example:

Search field. Enter a few letters of someone's name here. As you type, the widget searches for an Address Book entry about that person.

COMMON QUESTION

Free widgets

I really like widgets, but I wish they weren't locked into their own "layer" of Mac OS X. I want to be able to use a calculator when working in Excel, but without having to relegate the spreadsheet to the background.

No problem. This is done using the shareware program Amnesty Widget Browser, which can be downloaded, for example, from the Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com.

It places an icon in the menu bar that, when opened, displays a list of the names of all your widgets. Now you can open them individually and, more importantly, without putting your programs in the background. This way you free your widgets from the transparent layer in which they were enclosed.

If there are numbers at the bottom of the screen, such as "1/12", then this means that there are several matches found, and you are seeing the first of 12. You can click on the left and right arrows to view them all. Clicking the button located at the right end of the search field clears the field and allows you to start entering again.

Big red dot. Clicking on it opens the entry in the Address Book program that you see in front of you. This is convenient if, for example, you need to edit it.

Phone number. Click on it and it will be displayed on the screen in numbers so large that they can be seen from space. The idea is that the number will be visible at the other end of the room if you need to dial the number on the telephone set there.

Address Email. When you click on it, Mail (or whatever you use as your email program) launches with a new outgoing message already addressed to that person. All you have to do is enter the text and click the Send button.

Mailing address. Clicking on a postal address launches a web browser and takes you to MapQuest.com, where you open a geographic map of the location that address belongs to. Very smart.

Business (or Yellow Pages)

Yellow Pages for all businesses and organizations throughout the United States (here, as in a number of other widgets, data is only for the United States) are unlikely to be compact. They'll probably take up the whole room. But the convenience of such a reference book is invaluable! You can immediately find the nearest Chinese restaurant, hospital or convenience store, even if you find yourself in an unfamiliar city.

Now there is such an opportunity. Enter the name of what you are looking for in the text box exactly as it appears in the Yellow Pages directory. You can enter drug store, cleaning service, health club, tailor, library, etc. Another option is to click on the triangular down arrow next to this field and look to a list of services already known to this widget.

The widget sends a request to the Internet and after a while displays a list of local businesses that meet the criteria, including phone numbers and addresses. (Click the left or right arrows at the bottom of the window to see the next group of results.)

By the way, contact information elements respond to clicks. Click on the name of the place and a web page will open with additional information, clicking on a phone number enlarges it so it's visible from 50 feet away, and clicking on an address shows the location on a MapQuest map.

Note In order for a telephone directory to show local businesses, it must know what "local" means, which means where you are located. Your Mac may already know where you live. He could have received this information during the installation of Mac OS X or from the Address Book program (if you filled out the card for yourself).

But if he doesn't know where you live, or you're traveling with a laptop, you'll have to tell him. Perform any search using this widget (for example, try Banks). A familiar button will appear at the bottom of the results window. Click on it and the widget will “flip”; on the “back” indicate the city and state or zip code, the desired number of listings “per page” and the acceptable distance to the businesses in miles. After that, click on the Done button.

This is elementary pocket calculator with four actions and memory for one number. After the click, it is activated, that is, it begins to intercept keystrokes with numbers. (Pressing number keys is much faster than clicking numbers on the screen.)

This calculator does not have many capabilities: if you need hexadecimal numbers or at least extracting square roots, you should use the regular Calculator program

Apple has provided about 65,000 Tiger users in various ways access to a new built-in dictionary/thesaurus, and here's another one for you. Click Dictionary or Thesaurus, type the word you want, and press Enter. A convenient definitions panel will immediately open, displaying the corresponding dictionary entry. Triangular buttons in the upper left corner let you navigate through your latest searches, and a pop-up menu lets you choose whether to search in a dictionary, a thesaurus, or the Apple Terminology Dictionary (new in Leopard). Advice Once you find a word, you can search for new words by typing only the first few letters (you don't even have to press Return). Dictionary and thesaurus automatically show the definition for the first word that matches.

If you click on the button in the lower left corner, the dictionary panel will rotate and show the Oxford American Dictionaries logo on the “back side”. Out of curiosity, click on this logo. The web browser will launch, taking you to the Oxford University Press web page.

Advice Did you notice the first letter of your word appearing on a special rounded label on the left edge of the window? If you click on it, your word will be shown among other dictionary words, ordered alphabetically. This is useful if you need to find a word form or check spelling, or play word games with someone, such as “hangman”.

This widget shows live or final scores for amateur and professional sports competitions. (If the game has not yet started, the start time is shown.) By clicking on the button in the upper right corner, you can select the sport to watch. Clicking the News button will show you news headlines, and clicking a title will take you to the full ESPN article online.

Flight Tracker

This handy widget allows you to find out what flights there are between two cities, and if a flight is currently running, it will show its position on the map, altitude, speed and possible delay of arrival.

It may be a small window, but it performs many functions:

Search for flights. If you're planning a trip, this tool will show you a list of flights that match your itinerary. You can select the starting and ending points, as well as the desired airline, using the pop-up menu. (It's actually quicker to type in the city name or, better yet, the three-digit airport code if you know it.) Then click the Find Flights button or press Return or Enter.

After a while, a scrolling list of flights that meet your criteria will appear on the right side of the screen. The flight number, departure and arrival times, and airline name will be displayed.

This handy tool when your friend or relative arrives and you are not sure of the flight number, airline or arrival time.

Flight tracking. Typically, the Status column of the results will show the word “Scheduled,” which means a scheduled flight. But if you're lucky, you'll see "Enroute" in this column. This is interesting: after double clicking on this line you will see the actual position of this aircraft on geographical map(Fig. 5.26).

Advice If you click on the small round button before searching for a flight, the panel will flip over and show the logo of the flight data company on the “back.” Click on it and the company's web page will appear. However, after searching for flights, the button becomes inaccessible. To get it back, you need to close the widget and open it again.

This is just a standalone panel Google search. Type your search phrase, press Return or Enter and you will be taken to the search results web page.

Of course, you can always find out what date it is by clicking on the clock in the menu bar. But this calendar is much more beautiful. You can also look at past or future dates and figure out your plan for the current day. (This is a new feature of Leopard - showing the events scheduled for the day. The daily events are shown at the top.)

When you click on this widget, it expands with more or less details (Figure 5.27).

Advice Pressing Shift while clicking will show an animation.

This is a polished control panel for iTunes music player. It is designed for those who, while working, listen to music all day long, and for whom only the playback start and stop buttons are enough (Fig. 5.28). Of course, all these operations can be performed in the most iTunes program, in the smaller iTunes window, or even using the iTunes icon in the Dock. But when your Mac has a lot of windows open, the phone is ringing, and the baby is crying, it's quicker to stop the music by pressing F12 and then the Pause button on that widget.

This is a decent new widget coming to Leopard. With it, you can find out the showtime of your local movie theater on any day of the week, without rummaging through the newspapers, without wading through the menus of telephone directory services, and without squinting at flashing advertisements on web pages.

When you open this widget, you will see a miniature movie poster that changes every 3 seconds. At any time you can click on this poster and see what is “on the back” (Fig. 5.29).

In the left column is a scrollable list of movies showing in your area. Among them, the one whose poster you clicked is highlighted, but you can click on any other film and see below all the details about it: release date, rating, duration, cast, genre, plot summary and link to the video (trailer). After viewing the trailer, click on the left arrow button in the lower left corner of the widget.

The center column lists the nearest theaters where the film is playing. Select a cinema and showtimes will appear in the right column.

Advice How can a widget know what is “nearby”? You will tell him this yourself. By clicking the button, flip the widget over, and on the “back” side, enter your zip code or city and state. (Yes, of course: now you've seen three sides of this 2D widget. It has a front side, a back side, and a back side.)

By the way, the idea of “choose a film, and we will show the cinemas” is not the only one. See the "Movies Theatres" heading at the top left? Click on Theaters and the logic is reversed.

Now the mode “select a cinema, and we will show all the films that are shown in it” will be set. This is much more convenient if, for example, there is only one cinema nearby and you want to find out what awaits you there.

Advice To return to the initial mode of leafing through posters, click on an empty space in the window title.

People (or White Pages)

This widget is worth a lot. It's a White Pages telephone directory for the entire United States, packed into a tiny widget. Enter the information you know—at least your last name and state (or zip code)—and press Return or Enter. In a moment, the widget will present you with a list of all found names with phone numbers and addresses.

Click on a phone number and it will be shown in giant numbers that can be seen from across the room (or across town). Click on the address and you'll see a web page with a map showing that person's home. Click the button to limit your search to a specific radius around the city, state, or zip code you specified.

You can guess it yourself: a widget for skiers. Click the button and enter the name of the ski resort you want to visit. Enter a name (Vail, CO or Okemo, VT), then press Return.

If the widget shows the correct slope name, click Done and wait while the widget searches the Internet and shows you the current conditions - temperature, snow depth, cover type, etc.

Stickies are virtual Post-it Velcro on which you can print arbitrary pieces of text: phone number, web address, shopping list, etc.

Of course, Mac OS X includes the popular Stickies program (p. 397). Why did Apple duplicate it in Dashboard? For a simple reason: it can be called by pressing the F12 key, which is much faster.

On the other hand, the Stickies widget is not as flexible as the Stickies app. For example, you can't change the size of a note. And to add a second and third note, you need to click the + button at the bottom of the screen to show the widget panel, and then click the Stickies icon for each new note.

On the other hand, the Stickies widget is not as weak as it might seem. If you click on the small button in the lower right corner, the note will turn over, and on its “back” you can choose the paper color, font and font size.

Hello Day Traders! This widget will help you assemble a portfolio of securities and monitor its price changes throughout the day (Fig. 5.30).

To assemble your portfolio, click on the button at the bottom of the window. The widget will turn over and the configuration page will appear on the “back”.

To add a company to your list, type the company name or stock abbreviation in the top field; then click the + button or press the Return (or Enter) key. If there is only one match - for example, Microsoft - the widget will immediately add it to the list. If your input is unclear or there are multiple matches, a pop-up menu will appear with options from which you can click to select the one you want.

To remove a company from the list, click on its name and then click on the Remove button.

Advice Typically, the widget shows changes in stock prices in dollars (for example, “+0.92” means a rise of 92 cents). But if you check the Show change as a percentage checkbox, the changes will be presented as a percentage of the previous values.

But you can do without it: while studying stock statistics, switch between dollar and percentage values by clicking on the green or red data buttons.

Click the Done button to return to home screen with shares. It shows your list of stocks, their current price (okay - the one that was current 20 minutes ago) and the change in price - green (up) or red (down). Click on the stock name and a chart will appear below. (Change the time scale by clicking the buttons above the graph: 1d (1 day), 3m (3 months), 1y (1 year), etc.)

Finally, after double-clicking on the stock name, you are taken to a web browser and presented with a page with much more detailed analysis of the stock, courtesy of Yahoo! Finance.

U Microsoft Windows has its own game - Solitaire (Solitaire), and Macintosh has its own - Tile Game (Mosaic). The task, of course, is to, by reasoning logically and clicking on the puzzle squares, restore their correct sequence and the original photograph.

Advice The widget starts with a beautiful photo of a leopard – is the hint clear? - but you can replace it with any other.

To do this, first close Dashboard. Find a photo you like (for example, on your desktop or in iPhoto). Start dragging it in any direction. Without releasing your mouse button, press F12 (or the one you assigned to launch Dashboard) and release the graphic file directly above the Tile Game puzzle. The old image will be replaced by a new one (Fig. 5.30).

When playing for the first time, click inside to start the animated shuffle process. The second click stops mixing; that is, Apple leaves it up to you to decide how complex (jumbled) the puzzle will be.

But what if you, exhausted, gave up or missed the old photo of a leopard? Simply open the widget panel and launch a new instance of Tile Game.

The next time you travel abroad, plan your route so that your laptop always has high-speed wireless connection to the Internet. Then, using this widget, you can translate your phrases (or the words of local residents) into 13 languages.

Select the From and To languages using the pop-up menus, then enter a word, phrase, or paragraph in the top Translate From text box.

No need to click the mouse or press any keys: just wait. After a moment, the translation will be displayed in the lower field of the widget, as shown in Fig. 5.30 top left. (Don't click the squiggly, double-pointed arrow button to get a translation; it simply swaps the source and target languages.)

Of course, these translations are made by automated software robots on the Internet. As a result, their accuracy is nowhere near what you could get from a paid professional. On the other hand, if you urgently need to express yourself when you find yourself in the middle of a foreign city and don’t know the language, Dashboard’s capabilities may be sufficient.

Advice You may accidentally decide that this module is designed to translate your words into the local language. However, it can be much more useful for translating emails or web pages from a foreign language into your own language so you can read them.

Whatever units of measurement you need to convert - meters, grams, miles per hour - the Unit Converter widget is at your service.

From the top pop-up menu, select the type of transformation you want: Temperature, Area, Weight, etc. (While admiring the picture at the top of the window, it helps you determine the type of transformation you have chosen.)

Use the bottom pair of pop-up menus to specify the units you want to convert from and to, such as Celsius to Fahrenheit. Then enter the starting or ending value. For example, to convert 48 degrees Celsius to degrees Fahrenheit, enter 48 in the Celsius field. No clicks or keystrokes required: the conversion is instant and automatic as you type.

No one will say that technology stands still.

Advice What's particularly impressive is how Unit Converter converts currencies - like pesos to US dollars - because it actually takes the time to go online to find out the current rate and ensure the accuracy of the conversion.

This widget is clearly the most amazing Dashboard module. It shows a handy weather summary for your city (or any other) and can show the forecast for the next six days (see Figure 5.29, bottom left).

The main thing is to first click on the button in the lower right corner. The widget will turn over, and on its “back” you can set the city and state, or zip code. (You must write in English, for example Moscow, Russia.) You can also indicate your preferred scale (degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit) and whether you want the maximum and minimum temperatures to be displayed in the six-day forecast (the default is maximum). Click the Done button.

The front of the widget will now show your city name, today's predicted maximum and minimum temperatures, current temperature, and a graphical representation of weather conditions (sun, cloudy, rain, etc.). Click anywhere in the window to expand it and show the six-day forecast.

Advice Clearly, the Apple developers of this widget are very proud of their masterpiece. So that you can see all the wonderful weather pictures, they have given you a secret key combination that shows all 19 magnificent and eloquent sky pictures.

You just need to hold down the keys and Option and click on the widget. You will see how the weather changes in the city of Nowhere with every click you make.

Web Clips, new to Leopard, allows you to instantly create your own widget. However, this widget merely serves as a promotion for the Web Clips feature—and a reminder that your Web Clip journey should begin in Safari, not the Dashboard. See "Web Clips" below.

The value of these analog clock It’s not that they show the current time – it’s also in the menu bar. No, it consists in the ability to open several of these clocks - by clicking on World Clock in the widget panel - and for each clock, specify the city in which you want to display the time. The result is reminiscent of a row of clocks in a hotel lobby and gives you the image of Swiss precision.

To specify the city in which you want to display the time, click on the button in the lower right corner. The widget will flip over and show pop-up menus that allow you to set the continent and city.

Additional widgets

The great thing is that Dashboard is expandable. On the Internet you can find thousands of new widgets written by different people: games, chat and mail status displays, gas price indicators, calculators and translators, monitors for news, sporting events, financial indicators and factors affecting health. To find out what Apple currently has, there are two ways:

Fast way. Control-click (or right-click) the Dashboard icon in the Dock. From the quick access menu, select More Widgets.

The long way. Click on the Manage Widgets button that appears when you open the widget panel. When the Widgets widget opens, click More Widgets.

This will take you to the download page for Dashboard on Apple's website. (Or check the site with software for Mac, for example www.versiontracker.com, where the choice may be even wider.)

Some of the more striking widgets include Yahoo Local Traffic (shows traffic conditions in your area), Air Traffic Control (shows AirPort wireless access points within range of your laptop), and TV Tracker (shows you what you could be watching on TV instead of working). There are widgets for tracking FedEx packages, a “joke of the day,” a “comic of the day,” and many others (see Figure 5.31).

Mac OS X is smart enough to automatically install the widget once it's downloaded. However, first you are invited to try out the new widget, as shown in Fig. 5.31.

If you like it, you can click the Keep button and Mac OS X will copy the widget to your Home>Library>Widgets folder. It's important to note that only you will see this widget in your Dashboard because it's copied to the Widgets folder for your account. All other users of this Mac will not see it.

Unless, of course, you place this widget in the Library>Widgets folder (that is, starting from the Library folder in your main window hard drive). The contents of this Widgets folder are available to anyone who has Account on this machine.