Put Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets on your desktop
July 6th, 2008
The Mac OS X Dashboard is nice enough to completely disappear when you tell it to go away. However, in some cases, you might want one or two of the widgets to remain visible all the time, even if the Dashboard is not active. Here’s how to hack your Dashboard to do just that, in OS X Tiger or Leopard:
If F12 doesn’t bring up the dashboard: Some newer Mac keyboards have multiple functions assigned to the F12 key. If F12 turns up your system volume instead of bringing up the dashboard, you probably need to press Fn + F12 when the video prompts you to press F12.
Quick Reference
For a quick reference (or for you experts out there), here is a summary of the steps:
- Open Terminal (Macintosh HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal)
- Type the following commands:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
killall Dock
- Press F12 (or Fn + F12) to bring up the Dashboard
- Click and hold the left mouse button on the desired widget
- Press F12 (or Fn + F12) again
- The widget is now on the desktop
To put the widget back in the Dashboard, simply repeat steps 4 and 5.
If you found this helpful, I would really appreciate it if you would give the video a 5-star rating on YouTube.
Tags: macintosh, os x, dashboard, widget, desktop, tiger, leopard
July 7th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Neat. I remember once wanting to do this but I gave up pretty quickly.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:27 am
And it’s delightfully persistent, no amount of OSX updating has ever reset it for me after nearly two years.
(Unlike some other operating systems…)
August 8th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Very cool.
Nice announcing, too. Where’d you get that guy?