The Little Mac Book, Tiger Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Dashboard: Widgets at your fingertips

Dashboard provides quick access to information customized just for you, by you, displayed in the form of widgets. The widgets pop up in front of you with the click of a key and disappear just as quickly with another click of a key. You can see what time it is in cities around the world, check the weather in the town where your mother lives, access a dictionary and thesaurus, track the flights of planes, use a calculator, and much more.

Below you see an example of Dashboard with selected widgets showing, plus the Widget Bar along the bottom. The widgets appear on top of whatever's on your screen so you don't have to move anything out of the way.

To make Dashboard appear or disappear, tap the F12 key (it's above the Delete key on your keyboard). Or click the Dashboard icon in the Dock (shown to the right).

To make the Widget Bar appear or disappear, single-click the + sign in the bottom-left corner of your screen. As you can see below, once you show the Widget Bar, the + sign becomes an X; click the X to hide the Widget Bar.

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Add or delete widgets from your Dashboard

To add widgets to your Dashboard or to remove them, first display the Widget Bar, as explained on the previous page.

To add a widget, single-click its icon in the Widget Bar. The widget will appear in the Dashboard. Drag it into the position you want.

To remove a widget, click the X in its upper-left corner. You will only see this X when the Widget Bar is displayed!

Work with widgets

I'll show you how to work with a few of the widgets, and you'll quickly see how easy it is to work with all of them.

Many widgets display a tiny letter "i" when your pointer gets near a corner (it's not always in the same corner on each widget). When you see that little "i," single-click on it to flip the widget over. If you can flip it over, you'll often find preferences for that particular widget, as shown below. Click "Done" to flip it back to the front side.

Flip over the weather widget to change the preferences.

Type in a city and state (or country), then hit Enter.

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Use the Translation widget to translate from one language to another. Click the snake-like button to reverse the languages.

It's very interesting to translate a phrase or sentence into another language, then translate it back into English.

Convert just about any sort of measurement from one unit to another with the Unit Converter. The "Currency" option goes to the Internet to get the current exchange rate. Use the menus on both sides of the widget (left and right, not front and back) to choose what's being converted to what.

The Dictionary widget looks up words for you, as shown below. Click the "Thesaurus" heading to find synonyms.

To change the picture in the tile puzzle widget:

Display more than one widget

You can display multiple copies of any kind of widget, as shown in the example on page 183. For instance, you might like to know the weather in several different places, view the flight paths of a number of different flights, open several dictionary widgets to compare words, or view the weather for each of the cities where your children live.

Just click on a widget more than once to put more than one in the Dashboard. Each one lands directly on top of the one before, so you'll have to drag them off of each other!

Change the keyboard shortcut that opens Dashboard

If you don't like the keyboard shortcut that opens Dashboard, you can change it.

Just go to the Apple menu and open the System Preferences. Click the icon for "Dashboard & Exposé." You'll get the window shown below.

Click on the menu to the right of "Dashboard" and choose the key you want to use. If you want to add a modifier key to your shortcut (such as Shift, Control, Option, or Command), hold down that key while the menu is open and you'll see its key code added to the shortcut.

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