Tim Flight

Prior to obtaining Mac OS X “Tiger” I thought the most valuable feature to me would be Dashboard. After having Tiger purring for a few weeks I must say that I’m not a huge fan of Dashboard… yet.

My first impressions were not very good at all. Dashboard was slow… very slow. From the time I pressed F12 to the time my twelve widgets were loaded could be up to ten seconds. I wasn’t impressed. I wanted something faster. I wanted something that would work similar to Panic’s Statto only integrated into the OS versus an application.

Since Dashboard is so slow and I’m quite fast with a mouse and keyboard Dashboard just slowed me down. While there are many widgets that replicate information I gather frequently, I found that I could do it faster the old-fashioned, manual way.

As an example, I reach for the Calculator.app many times each day for quick calculations. The old fashioned way requires one click on the app in the Dock and then start crunching numbers. The application loads in a fraction of a second. With dashboard, I press F12, wait up to ten seconds for the Dashboard to load, then click on the calculator widget so it gets the cursor focus and then start calculating. One click the old way versus one keystroke, ten seconds, and one click later for Dashboard. It just isn’t handy.

I’ve explored dozens of third party widgets that perform a variety of tasks. I’ve added and removed dozens of widgets trying to find an optimal Dashboard that works for me; here is what I have discovered:

• Any widget that was designed to be interacted with, rather than just constantly displaying dynamic data (is that an oxymoron?) I ended up disliking and throwing out. All performed tasks that can be accessed faster with a web-browser and most of the time the widgets end up sending you back to your browser to view the results anyway.
• Browsers that pull information from the internet for display slow down loading of all widgets. If you have many weather widgets, multiple stock quotes to check, etc… these things will slow down Dashboard.
• Widgets that you set the preference once and don’t need to interact with were the ones that remained on my Dashboard in the long run; even if they pulled information from outside sources.

I’m slowly warming up to Dashboard now that I have a better understanding of its faults and limitations. Any widget that requires interaction (such as typing in a business name into the yellow pages widget) are now removed from my Dashboard. Most widgets that you set once and then return to Dashboard to check on a status (like weather, stocks, iCal events, etc) have remained on (or is that “in”?) my Dashboard.

I just noticed the way I use Dashboard seems to be consistent with the true meaning of the word “dashboard”. Most dashboard instruments provide one way feedback with a status/value… for the most part are not designed for two way interaction.

Tim Flight
Slowly warming up to OS X Dashboard

This entry was posted on Monday, May 30th, 2005 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.