Reloading Dashboard Widgets

One of the new features of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is Dashboard. Instead of talking about what Dashboard is, I want to show you a poorly documented feature (and nice eye-candy) that Apple placed in the Dashboard.

While I’m told to think of them as desk accessories/Konfabulator for Mac OS X, I prefer to think of them as Sherlock 2/Watson done right. That is because Dashboard widgets are basically HTML web pages + Javascript + optional Cocoa binding. As such, most dashboard widgets are simply web views. This means that sometimes your dashboard widget may be displaying something that needs updating from the web and it isn’t. Instead of complaining to that the widget developer was too moronic to include a control for widget reloading, you can reload your widget manually by hitting Apple-R.

When you do so you’ll be given a nice little Core Video eye-candy (click the picture below to “get” it).

About tychay

light writing, word loving, ❤ coding
This entry was posted in Macintosh, computers. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.