Second, Widgets became more prominent rather than being relegated to the side panel, Widgets adorned a user's Home Screen however they liked (a 'however they liked' that remains strictly restrained by Apple as to the placement and size of said Widgets). First, Widgets became more customizable and provided users with the content they care about. Many factors contributed to the success of widgets in iOS 14. By OS X 10.10, Dashboard was disabled by default, and in macOS 10.15, it was removed from the OS entirely. When Mac OS X 10.7 launched in 2011, Dashboard stopped being an overlay and became a separate page accessed via a swipe gesture, hotkey, or the LaunchPad. Yet, it took until just a couple of years ago for widgets to once again be a multi-platform effort, now with SwiftUI and, as Hackett wrote, without interactivity. Dashboard withered and died, but not before Dashcode bit the dust. That, obviously, was not well-received, and an official SDK for native apps was launched the following year. The idea was that developers could take their existing Mac OS X widget and convert it to work as an iPhone web app. The Mac has bigger displays than any iPad, yet has less screen real estate for visible widgets than an iPhone.Īt WWDC 2007, when Steve Jobs announced the “sweet solution” for iPhone apps, Dashcode was envisioned as a way to build those web apps. Alternative would be massively improving Launchpad to work much more like SpringBoard, and allow you to set that in place of your desktopīut forcing them into Notification Center on MacOS is poorly considered. Widgets need a permanent home in the Mac UI, not hidden off in a Notification Center nobody looks at anyway. They persist for a few reboots, then sometime in the middle of the day they’ll spontaneously disappear again. My Mac frequently forgets all my widgets. They generally have fewer features or display less information than their iOS counterparts, despite having access to the Mac’s larger display. I was not a heavy user of Dashboard, but I miss it because the new iOS-style widgets are a huge regression. Even on a Pro Display XDR, you get three visible notifications. Sadly, they all got stuffed into the slide-out Notification Center user interface Just one year after Catalina killed Dashboard, Apple started allowing developers to bring their iOS widgets over to the Mac in macOS Big Sur. Apple killed off Dashboard at exactly the wrong time.

Useful mac dashboard widgets