Bremsstrahlung

On the whole I've been pleased with Apple's recent operating system releases, but the last two, Tiger and Leopard, have both contained features and changes that I've just hated. Many of these were pointless alterations in the user interface that made it less to my liking¹, while others were big ticket features that I just didn't want at all².

Dashboard falls into the latter category. According to Apple:

Dashboard is a way to keep vital information at your fingertips, ready when you need it and easily hidden when you're done with it. That information is presented in the form of widgets-miniature applications that live exclusively in Dashboard.³

It sounds good, after all if I want information, getting it quickly is nice. Of course, it's not like before the Dashboard I had anyway to get information, certainly not quickly. Well, actually I virtually always have my web-browser open, so if I want information, I might as well ask Google, Wikipedia, or whatever website is relevant.

About those miniature applications: Why exactly do I want one? Okay, so the resource usage on the system will probably be a bit lower per widget than per regular application, but considering that I have plenty of RAM and virtual memory to open all the regular applications that I want without bothering to think about it, this doesn't seem like much of a concern. It also seems worth noting that many users are not likely to think much about RAM usage on a daily basis; they know more RAM is good, so they install plenty of chips in the computer, and then they get on with their computing.

I was personally delighted to discover that it was not just possible but easy and painless to simply erase the dashboard on Tiger, which I did. I have never had second thoughts, and have never seen any mention of a widget that I would have wanted. Many people, however, went nuts for the dumb thing. By the time Leopard was announced, I had all but forgotten the thing, and while other people seem to have been using it, they weren't saying too much about it. As part of the list of Leopard's 300 new features were three for the Dashboard and seven concerning the new Dashcode application to aid in the development of widgets. To me, the Dashboard upgrades themselves looked unexciting, and I didn't care how many features Dashcode had, because I never planned to use it anyway. It seems that at this point most people agree with me, as I've noticed no more excitement about the Dashboard now or shortly after Leopard arrived than during the period before. People just seem to have lost interest.

In the end, this loss of interest doesn't surprise me. It looks like it took some people longer than others to decide that the even though Dashboard is shiny and may look cool, it really doesn't do much, certainly not much that can't be done other better ways. This is especially the case given how much of their time many computer users spend using websites to fetch the information they want. Dashboard just kind of got overshadowed, and while I think many people still use it a little, few people seem to use it a lot. Despite all of the hype, there didn't turn out to be much substance.