Betalogue

I wasn’t aware of this trick, which is included in the latest edition of Apple’s eNews (July 28, 2005):

Quick Widget Tip. How’d you like to keep the Calculator Widget open even after you bid Dashboard adieu. Here’s how. First, hit the F12 key to reveal your Dashboard. Then drag the Calculator widget onto the desktop, and before you release it, hit the F12 key again. Voilà, while all your other widgets have fled the scene, the fully functional Calculator widget remains. When you’re done with it, simply hit the F12 key twice.

What’s not clear in the tip is that you have to drag not an existing instance of the widget, but the widget icon itself from the widget drawer at the bottom of Dashboard. And you don’t have to drag it “onto the desktop”. (How could you drag onto the desktop when the desktop is “hidden” behind Dashboard?) Just click and drag anywhere, and hit F12 before you release the mouse button.

It works not just for the Calculator, but for any widget.

This is not a permanent thing. The remaining widget goes back to Dashboard as soon as you hit F12 again. (Apple says to hit F12 twice, simply because hitting it once will both move the widget back to Dashboard and bring up Dashboard. So you have to hit a second time to exit Dashboard.)

I also like the “bid Dashboard adieu” phrase in this tip. It sounds as if Apple hasn’t yet determined what the proper terminology should be for showing and hiding Dashboard. Show/Hide? Enter/Exit? Reveal/Conceal? Say Hello/Bid Adieu? Hail Mary/Amen?

Whatever…

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Friday, July 29th, 2005 at 10:26 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.