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OS X Operating Systems Software Apple Technology

Apple Will Permanently Remove Dashboard In macOS Catalina (theverge.com) 98

"Apple's Dashboard is getting quietly removed from the company's upcoming macOS Catalina update," reports The Verge, citing Appleosophy and MacRumors. "The Dashboard first launched seven years ago with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005 and saw its final update in 2011 with the launch of OS X 10.7 Lion." From the report: The app first introduced the concept of widgets to Apple's desktop operating system and became a hallmark of OS X design for more than a decade. In particularly, Dashboard became well known for its desktop Sticky Note feature and its overall skeuomorphic approach best emphasized by the clock, stocks, and calculator widgets, a design philosophy that formed the foundation of the first version of iOS that launched a few years after OS X Tiger. It wasn't until iOS 7 in 2013 that Apple would abandon that aesthetic for a flatter, more modern one that eventual carried back over to its desktop approach.

Since 2011, Dashboard has been accessible in various forms, but it's had none of its widget design or UI updated, making it a bit of an anachronism existing behind the scenes on macOS. With OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple disabled the application by default, but still allowed users to access it either as a hotkey overlay or its own separate space within Mission Control. Now, in macOS Catalina, it appears Dashboard is going away for good. Appleosophy tried to disable and enable the Dashboard via Terminal only for the system to show it as missing even after a forced reboot. The Launchpad overlay also shows the Dashboard app icon as a question mark, the same as with the broken up and effectively killed off iTunes.

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Apple Will Permanently Remove Dashboard In macOS Catalina

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  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @08:45PM (#58710648)

    Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!

    • "The app first introduced the concept of widgets to Apple's desktop operating system and became a hallmark of OS X design for more than a decade."

      Have fun without widgets.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Please take Mission Control with you as you leave. That app picker is equally useless; basically a desktop rendition of the iOS app picker.

      • I like mission control personally, but I agree on the app picker— a random idea for a function better performed by command-space. I often have 20+ windows open across my monitors, and mission control makes it easy to switch and manage things.

    • While they really abandoned it a few years ago, I had a number of widgets that were useful to me, and I will miss the feature, at least in concept. The only real problem (ok, biggest) with it was the widgets aren’t continuously updated, so there is a significant lag when you first switch to the dashboard.

      I’ll miss my world clock time/temperature/weather widget...

      • by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @05:41AM (#58711752)

        Yeah I still use it too.

        Mine has six clocks with various timezones so I can quickly check the time in london, san fransisco sydey or whatever. Its got a calculator for quick maths, the weather app and various stickies depending on what i want to remember

        Its a crusty old system, but I'll be searching for a replacement when its gone

  • by neilo_1701D ( 2765337 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @08:56PM (#58710698)

    Not going to miss it going away. I discovered it by accident once, and thought how useless it was. It really reminds be of the desktop widgets of Windows Vista, which were kinda useful but not missed in their demise with Windows 7.

    • by _merlin ( 160982 )

      It was moderately useful if you had useful widgets for things you wanted to access at a glance. I had usage monitors for my metered Internet connections, widgets to show the outlook/forecast from the Bureau of Meteorology (Australia), the dictionary/thesaurus, and the unit converter (which also did currency conversion). I missed the old spaces - I liked being able to think spatially with it. Mission Control always felt ugly an unnatural. I've given up on Macs completely now though.

    • Not going to miss it going away. I discovered it by accident once, and thought how useless it was. It really reminds be of the desktop widgets of Windows Vista, which were kinda useful but not missed in their demise with Windows 7.

      I thought the exact opposite. I had something like 10 world clocks on there, a translator utility, a currency converter, a multi lingual dictionary and a bunch of other stuff and it was all accessible by a single keyboard action or a couple of gestures.

    • I had to look at the screenshot to know what it was. Having to get rid of all my windows to get to the desktop has never been a workflow I'm particularly happy with. Right now, my windows are probably a dozen deep - it's far quicker to press the calculator in the dock bar thing and use it in a window than it is to get to the desktop. I appreciate other use-cases exist, but I tend to check the weather once in the morning and forget about it for the rest of the day (other than maybe staring out of the window)

  • Perhaps someone from the Mac developer community could port Rainmeter [rainmeter.net] to Mac
  • "seven years ago" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @09:34PM (#58710804)

    WTFH beauHD?!?!?

    Seven years ago... in 2005. In just what goddamned alternate number system do you figure that 2019-2005=7? That's not even a missed decimal place error, which would land you in 2002! I already knew it was way too much to ask of you and your cadre of Slashdot "editors" to do the jobs of actual editors. But it it *REALLY* too much to ask of you to be able to master elementary-school level arithmetic?

    And by the way, to anyone who might defend this dolt: TfuckingA correctly says fourteen years. So, no, it wasn't a copy&paste error; not that that would excuse it anyway.

  • Well it's about time they did that! OK. I've never actually used an Apple computer and I have no idea how to. I'm OK with that. Oops! I used an Apple ][c in school. I remember the "twisted system master"
  • Dashboard is the one thing on macOS that I use constantly. I have a 12month calendar there, easy currency conversion (with free input). Weather info (the only thing that exists as a notification widget), conversion stuff, etc.

    But yeah, death is death. Another useful thing dies *shrug* So it goes.

  • Back when it was released I found it quite cool, I had the calculator and the weather in the dashboard, yet somehow I forgot about it. I asked a few of my friends with osx, it had also slipped their minds. Based on this sample of 4, it looks like that the removal will be invisible for many.
  • Been using a Mac for many years. Not sure what's the difference between the dashboard and mission control?
    • Mission Control is basically a funky window switcher. Think alt-tab on Windows and you've got it.

      Dashboard is a separate screen where you can load up widgets to do things. Kinda like the widgets you can get for the Notification Center. Also think Windows Vista Sidebar done full-screen.

  • I wish Conky for MacOS was usable. Last time I checked, it didn't have the hooks into the OS to do anything useful.

  • Will be missed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tronster ( 25566 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @05:53AM (#58711778) Homepage

    Most people I've met who purchased their first Mac since 2010 or later have not adopted it; perhaps because its benefits (or just its existence) was not touted to users. I'm guessing the biggest issue was that it didn't get much use by the majority of current users and so there was no incentive to keep supporting it.

    Personally, I'll miss the functionality and hope their is a good 3rd party alternative that can be installed. Currently I have on my dashboard:
    - Weather
    - Day Calendar with month showing
    - iStat Pro (memory, CPU, WIFI, etc... stats, 3rd party)
    - A programming calculator (3rd party)
    - Three simple calculators
    - Five sticky notes, each color coded for different reminder/lists

  • The dashboard is almost like Apple couldn't make fully robust apps so they needed an excuse and they called it the dashboard. Not sure how they managed to make an under powered calendar app but they managed it.
  • "Spaces" is terrible. Once you have a window in a "space" it would show associated windows in front of it properly. When you are on a 'space' and you alt-tab to an application not in a 'space' it doesn't show that application; you have to move to the space to see the application. Why can't Apple just add sensible window tiling like every other OS?
  • by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @08:07AM (#58712122) Journal

    "It worked really well and people liked it," an Apple spokesperson said, "so we removed it."

"The Computer made me do it."

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