disable dashboard or set your widgets free!

lately i realized that dashboard is pretty useless for me because some of the info i want from widgets like the weather os system stats or the clock from another timezone are things i want to see all the time – not when i hit F12.

It came to my mind that some time ago there was a similar thing to dashboard – oh what was is called – konfabulator? yes, konfabulator is still alive (but bought by yahoo! making it free asfree beer).

Now i have two options:

1. use yahoo! widgets instead of dashboard
2. use the dashboard development mode to convert widgets in floating windows

for both options here are the hacks:

There may be other reasons you’d rather not have Dashboard available. For instance, if you run a lab of Macs in a school, you may not want the students wasting all their work time on the Asteroids video game widget or watching the (I am not making this up) Goblet of Fire movie release date countdown Widget. If you’d like to disable Dashboard, for either RAM usage or other reasons, here’s how to do it:

It requires a trip to the Terminal, in /Applications/Utilities, but it’s not too hard to do.Open Terminal, and then type this command, followed by the Return key:

$ defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

This tells the system that you no longer wish to have Dashboard available. However, the Dashboard task is actually “owned”ù by the Dock, so to make your changes take effect, you need to restart the Dock. The easiest way to do that is to type this command into the Terminal (and press Return when done):

$ killall Dock

After the Dock restarts, hit F12 and you’ll see nothing at all. If you run Activity Monitor, you also won’t find any Dashboard widgets in the list of tasks, even if you had several open when you ran the above command. Dashboard has been eliminated from your system, and won’t return until you tell it to do so. You can do just that by opening Terminal again, and typing this command:

$ defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Disable Dashboard

If you’d like one of your Dashboard widgets to be available all the time, instead of only when you have activated Dashboard via F12, then activate the Dashboard dvelopment mode. Open the Terminal and type

$ defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

and press Return. Then logout and log back in again. Now debugging mode is activated. To get a widget off of the Dashboard and onto your desktop, just do the following:

Activate Dashboard by pressing F12 (or whatever key you’ve assigned to Dashboard). Begin dragging the widget. Press F12 again, before letting up on the mouse button. Drop the widget wherever you want it. You can do the same thing in reverse to drag the widget back onto the Dashboard. Also of interest: while a widget is frontmost, you can press Command-R to reload it.

macosxhints.com – 10.4: Detach widgets from the Dashboard