Go to your SYSTEM PREFERENCES (looks like a gear in your dock).
So if you have never used a dashboard here is how to activate it. There was no need to go searching through Time Machine to gather the information I thought I had lost. But when I activated the dashboard, my old dashboard suddenly was back with all the right widgets and all the sticky notes with their contents all in place. I went through the process of activating a dashboard thinking that I would have to reinstall all my widgets (not a hard task) and look up all the phone numbers and other reminders that I had on the sticky notes. The widgets I knew I could reinstall, but the information on the sticky notes, I thought was lost.
Forgetting that I had a time machine back up of everything as well as a manual back up of certain important things, panic rushed through me because I had not remembered to copy all the information contained on my sticky notes for my manual back up.
The basic categories include blogs and forums, business, calculate and convert, developer, email and messaging, food, games, information, international, just for fun, movies and TV, music, networking and security, news, radio and podcasts, reference, search, shopping, sports, status, transportation, travel, and finally webcams.Īfter upgrading, indeed all my folders were in place and so were my multiple desktops but the dashboard was no where to be found. Actually Apple has a list of them in all that totals 1,941. But these are only a few of the many widgets available to install.
On my dashboard, I have a calculator, a widget that converts weights and measures of all kinds from metric to English and visa versa, a handy calendar showing months at a time as well as today’s date, a weather widget showing the weather for the next five days as well as the current temperature and conditions for my location and a dictionary/thesaurus plus all those sticky notes with valuable information. A similar swipe going the other direction will take me to my other desktops. With just a two fingered swipe one way on my magic mouse I can get to my dashboard. When I upgraded from Yosemite to El Capitan, I didn’t do a clean install, so I assumed that all the settings including all my widgets and sticky notes on my dashboard would remain in place just as the folders on my desktops have always done upon upgrading. The Launchpad overlay also shows the Dashboard app icon as a question mark, the same as with the broken up and effectively killed off iTunes.I have always used the dashboard feature of Apple’s operating systems from way back. Appleosophy tried to disable and enable the Dashboard via Terminal only for the system to show it as missing even after a forced reboot. Now, in macOS Catalina, it appears Dashboard is going away for good. With OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple disabled the application by default, but still allowed users to access it either as a hotkey overlay or its own separate space within Mission Control. Since 2011, Dashboard has been accessible in various forms, but it's had none of its widget design or UI updated, making it a bit of an anachronism existing behind the scenes on macOS. It wasn't until iOS 7 in 2013 that Apple would abandon that aesthetic for a flatter, more modern one that eventual carried back over to its desktop approach. In particularly, Dashboard became well known for its desktop Sticky Note feature and its overall skeuomorphic approach best emphasized by the clock, stocks, and calculator widgets, a design philosophy that formed the foundation of the first version of iOS that launched a few years after OS X Tiger.
"The Dashboard first launched seven years ago with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005 and saw its final update in 2011 with the launch of OS X 10.7 Lion." From the report: The app first introduced the concept of widgets to Apple's desktop operating system and became a hallmark of OS X design for more than a decade. "Apple's Dashboard is getting quietly removed from the company's upcoming macOS Catalina update," reports The Verge, citing Appleosophy and MacRumors.