. Dashboard As you know, the essence of using Mac OS X is running programs, which of ten produce documents. | . Dashboard As you know the essence of using Mac OS X is running programs which of ten produce documents. In Leopard however there s a third category a set of weird hybrid entities that Apple calls widgets. They appear all at once floating in front of your other windows when you press the F12 key. Welcome to the Dashboard Figure 5-23 . Note On the thin aluminum Apple keyboard the Dashboard has a different keystroke F4. In fact you can see a tiny Dashboard logo painted right on the key. The F12 keystroke can still work but see the box on Section . Either way you can change this keyboard assignment as described below. Also on laptops where F12 is the Eject key you have to hold down the Fn key lower-left corner . Figure 5-23. When you summon the Dashboard you get a fleet of floating miniprograms that convey or convert all kinds of useful information. They appear and disappear all at once on a tinted translucent sheet that floats in front of all your other windows. You get rid of Dashboard either by pressing the same key again F12 or whatever or by clicking anywhere on the screen except on a widget. What are these weird hybrid entities anyway They re not really programs because they don t create documents or have Dock icons although Dashboard itself has a Dock icon . They re certainly not documents because you can t name or save them. What they most resemble actually is little Web pages. They re meant to display information much of it from the Internet and they re written using Web programming languages like HTML and JavaScript. The starter widgets include a calculator current weather reporter stock ticker clock a new movie-showtimes widget and so on. You may have to wait 30 seconds or so for them to warm up go online and display any meaningful information. Mastering the basics of Dashboard won t take you long at all To move a widget drag it around the screen. Click anywhere but on a button menu or text box. To close a widget press the Option key as you move .
