![]() ![]() It wasn’t until 2020 that Apple actually started letting users place widgets on their home screen. However, the implementation on iPhone was limited to what you could argue was the “new” Dashboard: Notification Center―a screen dedicated to viewing widgets and notifications. Though widgets were available on Android from the early days of that platform, iOS users didn’t gain the feature until 2014 in iOS 8. In a lot of ways, the success of Dashboard was a precursor to the iPhone App Store, showing an appetite for bite-sized, feature-specific apps.įast forward to today, and, in a roundabout way, the iPhone is now responsible for bringing a new-and-improved version of Dashboard back to the Mac. With the removal of Dashboard in 2019 however, widgets were relegated to the Notification Center, forcing those who actually use widgets to interact with a part of macOS very few people want to use. Eventually, Mac developers would add thousands upon thousands of available widgets to Dashboard. (The skeuomorphic design language of the OS X days drove the physicality of these widgets home even further.) And those were just some of the stock options available. In the Dashboard you could place a clock, sticky notes, a calculator, stock tickers, a dictionary, etc.―just like a physical desk. As a visual metaphor, it was a more literal representation of a real world “desktop” than any personal computer OS had included to that point.ĭashboard with widgets in OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Invoking it brought a group of widgets to the foreground of the desktop. Introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Dashboard would go on to become one of the defining features of the OS X era. So, a lot of people were very happy to hear that Apple is planning on bringing a version of the functionality Dashboard provided back to the Mac in mac OS Sonoma. Dashboard rebornīeyond other ways that macOS Catalina earned its rather infamous reputation among Mac diehards, a particularly frustrating example for widget lovers was the removal of Dashboard in that OS release.ĭisabled by default in OS X 10.10 Yosemite before getting the ax completely in Catalina, Dashboard has been missed ever since. The new widgets implementation is the feature that has the most potential of augmenting your use of the Mac moving forward in a meaningful way. MacOS Sonoma brings more customization, the addition of long-needed features for Safari, new screen savers, a Game Mode(!?), and what looks like the reincarnation of the much-beloved Dashboard of Mac days gone by.Īnd it’s that last one that really feels like the most substantial update in this new OS. Instead, Apple is adding some new stuff and some old stuff back into the OS with the aims of making the entire experience of owning a Mac better. MacOS Sonoma is not quite the bug fix update a lot of Mac users were hoping for. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |