16 Responses to “Howler of the Year?”

1. Ted Pavlic says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 3:11 am

   Now, in order for me to turn off the Dashboard in OS X, it took a little bit of a runaround. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but it involved changing preferences and other things an OS X novice might cringe at.

   I wonder if it’ll be possibel to turn off “Gadgets” in Vista.

   (note: One reason I hated Dashboard was because there was no way for it to be on top (as mentioned in the link above); however, I have much bigger concerns devoting system resources to maintaining these stupid little things in the background–maybe if I get a MacBook Pro this won’t be so much of a concern?)

2. Dave M. says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 3:22 am

   I hate to burst your humor bubble… Does anyone remember “Desk Accessories” back in the original Macintosh OS days? I would say that those were your original “widgets”. They were not nearly as easy to develop as Widgets are now, but they held the same functionality.

3. sjk says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 7:46 am

   Not sure I understand your reason to “turn off” Dashboard, Ted. What resources does it use when it’s never activated? There’s no separate dashboard process in that state, just the Dock icon indicating it’s “available”.

4. sjk says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 7:51 am

   Does anyone remember “Desk Accessories” back in the original Macintosh OS days? I would say that those were your original “widgets”.

   Dashboard vs. Konfabulator is a trip down that memory lane.

5. Dave M. says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 7:52 am

   SJK: I take it you have never looked at “top” on your Mac? All the dashboard widgets that are loaded up are running and taking resources away from the Mac. Mind you, not very much and really no CPU time, but they are all running processes.

   I use GeekTools and have a constant “top” running on my desktop screen. It’s a great tool for monitoring your system.

6. Ted Pavlic says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 7:58 am

   I don’t want the temptation to even be available. I don’t want to accidentally hit F12. I don’t want to accidentally move my mouse into a special hot corner. I don’t want to accidentally hit the Dashboard button in the dock. Even worse, I don’t want someone else to accidentally do this unleashing memory-grabbing widgets all over my system without me even realizing it until it’s too late.

   It’s true I can just disable the f-key, change my hot corners, and get the button out of the dock, and this really is equivalent to disabling the Dashboard. (and to be safe, I could get rid of all widgets so that none will load even if Dashboard somehow gets started) However, this seems just as bad as toggling the Dashboard preference off, so I’d just rather do that and not worry about it.

   Something like the Dashboard, which will be utterly useless to someone who has no attraction to widgets or would rather use Konfabulator, should have a System Preferences panel that allows me to turn it off without having to consult Google. That’s all I’m saying.

7. Ted Pavlic says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 8:02 am

   Dave: I think SJK’s point is that Dashboard delays its execution until actually needed. So it’s not started up ahead of time until you actually move your mouse to a hot corner, hit F12, or hit the Dashboard dock icon.

   I suppose using GeekTools and top together is probably a low resources way of running an Activity Monitor, no? That’s the thing I hate about using Activity Monitor… It seems like it itself requires way more resources than it should be, especially if I need to call it up at a sluggish time when something else is spinning away all of my CPU time.

8. Tim says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 8:45 am

   @Dave — I’ve been too elliptical.

   The howler is about Hippocrates (Wikipedia ) not about widgets and gadgets.

9. sjk says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 10:06 am

   I think SJK’s point is that Dashboard delays its execution until actually needed.

   Yep, you correctly surmised the “never activated” part of my original question.

   I don’t want the temptation to even be available.
   …
   That’s all I’m saying.

   That’s all? :-)
   Understood — thanks for the explanation.

   I don’t use Dashboard much. One reason is because I’d prefer having more control over which collection of widgets will be run when it’s first activated. Sometimes I’ll only want to view a single widget without all the previous ones launching. And since widget locations aren’t preserved when quitting/restarting any attempts for long-term spatial orientation become futile.

   I use GeekTools and have a constant “top” running on my desktop screen. It’s a great tool for monitoring your system.

   The background Desktop is frequently too obscured for “dynamic desktop” utilities like GeekTools to be as useful as other methods I use to monitor my systems.

10. Dave M. says:
    August 16th, 2006 at 10:55 am

    Yep, I rebooted and looked at the processes afterward. Sure enough, no dashboard processes until after I pressed f12. I guess I should have figured that out since they initialize the first time they come up after a reboot.

    Sorry about that. I’m still a little new to the platform having just switched from Windows.

    Personally, I’m a huge stats kind of guy. I love watching the CPU graphs, network activity graphs, etc… Tiger doesn’t give one the ability to use widgets to monitor the system since you can’t see them while using other apps. I think Leopard is supposed to allow us to have widgets be modeless (basically visible on the desktop while using other apps).

11. Martin says:
    August 17th, 2006 at 4:09 am

    Dave,

    I’m a fan of Konfabulator Yahoo! Widget Engine (Y!WE), but you can’t knock Widgets for the inability to run them on your screen.

    Just do this: Press F12 (or whatever you’re using nowadays), click and HOLD one of your widgets, then press F12 again and “drop it” onto your normal desktop. Voila! Your widget is now ever-present on your screen. Quite annoying, actually, because it is always on top of everything. To “put it back”, simply click and HOLD on it, then press F12 and “drop it” onto Dashboard.

    Y!WE has a Konsposé “Heads up display” mode like Dashboard, but when your widget’s on on-screen, you can at least set them to be always on top, always underneath or somewhere in the middle of your other application screens. I find this significantly more useful. Perhaps Leopard will add these capabilities to Widgets? We’ll see.

12. Dave M. says:
    August 17th, 2006 at 4:23 am

    Are you talking from OS X 10.5’s point of view here when you talk about dropping Widgets on the desktop? I just tried it with Tiger and no dice.

    I’m not knocking Widgets at all. They have their purpose. I use quite a lot of them myself and I have a few on my parents machine to save tons of time getting their computer’s IP address.

13. Ted Pavlic says:
    August 17th, 2006 at 6:06 am

    I’m not knocking Widgets at all. They have their purpose. I use quite a lot of them myself and I have a few on my parents machine to save tons of time getting their computer’s IP address.

    That seems a little overblown for a widget, isn’t it?

    Assuming you’re looking for the external address advertised to the rest of the world, couldn’t you just visit a site like http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm that spits out to you your IP address? A bookmark to one of these sites seems just as functional without having to suck up system resources when it sits in the background when not needed.

14. David says:
    August 19th, 2006 at 1:44 am

    Am I missing something? I don’t see what Hippocrates, the “father of medicine”, has to do with widgets. It seems that hipocrisy is the term that best fits the context of Apple claiming that MS is unoriginal.

15. Tim says:
    August 19th, 2006 at 1:51 am

    You don’t like the idea that something could be so “Hippocratic” that it makes you sick? ;-)

16. Ted Pavlic says:
    August 19th, 2006 at 1:54 am

    Well, while I’m sure this was a typo, you could argue that he was saying Apple was stuck in its Google-like “do no harm” attitude by insisting that Microsoft is ripping them off (while not pointing out that they’re ripping other people off).

    Thus, “do no harm” and Hippocrates.

    Though, probably a typo.

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