OS X Dashboard: can it be revived, or is it destined to be a ghost town?
"The first thing I do when I buy a new Mac is '$ killall Dock' to stop the resource sucking widgets," Enso Cloud tweeted at me last week. "Does anyone actually use Dashboard widgets?" Chris MacDonald said.
"No to widgets. I disable them on all Macs I work on. They're quite stagnant and useless with an iOS device nearby," Ken Fager added. Do you still use the OS X Dashboard? It turns out that a good number of Mac users don't—or at least those who follow Ars (and me) on Twitter.
The rest of us apparently continue to hobble along with Dashboard, using long-outdated widgets and clinging to the often-misguided hope that someone—anyone—will maintain the ones we've come to rely on in our everyday lives. Indeed, there are many (OK, some) that are still functioning, but most of the ones in Apple's Dashboard widget listing are not in active development, while many are barely even maintained. It's somewhat perplexing, then, that the newest version of OS X—Mountain Lion, just released on Wednesday—still supports the Dashboard.
