Apple Dashboard

» see apple.com/macosx as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dashboard arrived with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in April 2005. The pitch was that you could press F12 and a translucent overlay would fly in, full of small single-purpose widgets that nobody had quite known they wanted. A calculator floated on the left. A weather widget sat in the corner. The widgets ran on a tiny HTML and JavaScript runtime baked into WebKit, which made them the first place a lot of mac developers shipped serious web code outside of Safari.

Apple's framing was that the desktop had grown too crowded and small live data deserved a separate plane. The product everyone pointed at was Konfabulator, a 2003 cross-platform widget engine for windows and mac that Yahoo would later acquire and rebrand as Yahoo Widgets. Konfabulator's developer Arlo Rose went on record being unhappy at the Apple announcement. Apple had looked at the same product space and decided the answer belonged in the OS itself.

I missed Dashboard for the same reason I missed most mac-only software of this era. The home machine was a windows desktop on ttnet broadband, and the work machine got a linux install whenever anyone would let me put one on it. Dashboard sat behind a function key on a hardware bracket I did not own. By the time I got hands on a mac in the early 2010s, Dashboard was already on its way out and the widget catalog felt like an abandoned art project.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

The widget gallery grew fast. Apple shipped about a dozen widgets with Tiger and let third-party developers submit their own through a dashboard-widgets page on apple.com. Within a year the catalog had thousands of entries. Most were small utilities written by hobbyists in an afternoon, which was Dashboard's strongest pitch. A widget was just a folder of html and javascript with a plist on top. Anyone who could make a webpage could ship one. The barrier to entry was lower than any other apple developer tool of the era.

For a few years the widget plane was a recognizable mac feature. Print ads used it. Reviewers mentioned it in every Mac OS X review. The most-installed ones were the ones bundled by default, but third-party hits showed up. The iStat menubar-style system monitors and the various delivery trackers were the ones that lasted longest.

~ the decline ~

The first problem was that widgets had no obvious staying power. You opened the plane and used the calculator for ten seconds before dismissing it. There was no notification surface and no persistence in your workflow. The second problem was that the iphone shipped in 2007 with single-purpose tiny apps that did everything Dashboard widgets were trying to do, but better, and on a device you actually carried. Within two years the same developers who had been making Dashboard widgets were making iphone apps instead.

Apple kept shipping Dashboard but stopped iterating on it. By OS X Lion in 2011 the floating overlay was replaced by a separate space, which made it feel even more like a place you visited rarely and left quickly. The widgets gallery on apple.com went stale. By Yosemite in 2014 Dashboard was disabled by default. New mac owners had to dig into system preferences to find out it existed at all.

~ the next chapter ~

macOS Catalina removed Dashboard entirely in October 2019. The widgets stopped working and the keyboard shortcut did nothing. Four years later macOS Sonoma brought widgets back to the desktop and to Notification Center, which is exactly what Dashboard had been doing, just as a normal layer of the OS rather than a hidden plane behind a function key. The underlying technology stack was different but the product shape was familiar. Apple had needed a decade to decide whether widgets belonged in your face or out of it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »