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Here's How Interactive Widgets Work in macOS Sonoma

Used geektool for years to place custom widgets and camera feeds on my desktop. This is even better. :)
 
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Dashboard widgets, those were the good old times ...

Screen_Shot_2019_06_04_at_3.17.16_PM.png
 
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Rossik said:
Back in Dashboard days, there was even a line of terminal code or perhaps a setting in the Onyx app or such where you then hold on to a widget while closing dashboard and it would remain on the desktop.
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It has been a while but I thought there was a key you could hold (option maybe) when you clicked the widget that would make it stay on screen after the dashboard closed
 
Populus said:
I actually have an app (DockTime) that sits on the Dock, and it is a clock. The icon is a clock that shows the time in real time. I'm eager to have this widgets to get rid of that app, and have a proper clock on my desktop.
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As opposed to clocks that don’t show the time in real time, lol. And am I missing something? There is a clock in the menu bar; also showing time in real time. Why not just look at that?
 
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I totally don't care for widgets cluttering my desktop. In a world full of shiny screens constantly screaming information at you, the last thing we need on our computers is even more distractions.
 
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Saint_Blaise said:
Is this an old macos version?
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OK, I feel like some old man in a nursing home. Gather 'round, kids and I'll you about Dashboard...

For quite a few years there was a feature called Dashboard in what was then called OS X. When you activated it (through a dedicated key on F3 I believe), a layer of widgets would quickly get superimposed over everything on your desktop.

You'd check whatever information you needed to check and then quickly dismiss the whole layer and get back to whatever you were doing before. You could even "clip" out sections of websites and put those in Dashboard and they would update themselves. There was also a big directory of third-party widgets hosted on Apple's site.

Anyway, it was frankly a pretty genius bit of UI because it gave you space to spread out whatever widgets you chose to use, but because it was an HUD-style layer it didn't interfere with anything else. But it stagnated and they slowly killed it by leaving the feature off by default, and by taking away its labelled key on the keyboard.(A lot of people speculated/fantasized that they'd start porting iOS apps out onto Dashboard widgets, but that never happened. We are now much closer to that being possible with Apple Silicon, but who knows.)

This new implementation in Sonoma is interesting, but it seems like they've weirdly put it everything on the same layer as the Finder or even underneath it.
 
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Gnik Nus said:
I totally don't care for widgets cluttering my desktop. In a world full of shiny screens constantly screaming information at you, the last thing we need on our computers is even more distractions.
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I have great news for you! You actually are not legally required to put any widgets on your desktop at all. And yet somehow at the same time others can do so if they prefer. Amazing!

iamgalt said:
As opposed to clocks that don’t show the time in real time, lol. And am I missing something? There is a clock in the menu bar; also showing time in real time. Why not just look at that?
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User 1: Wow, this feature would be useful for me because of the way I like to use my computer!
User 2: Let me explain why you're wrong and what you're doing is bad.

If an entirely optional feature comes around and you don't want to use it, what exactly is the problem? For example, I don't at all care for Launchpad and I find it clunky and lame. At the same time, if someone else really likes Launchpad, more power to them. I just never touch it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
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How is this different from 2003 Konfabulator that turned into 2005 Yahoo! Widgets? Final release of Yahoo! Widgets was in 2009. Support of it soon ended years later.

2+ decades later Konfabulator makes it comeback. I miss having to see real time weather maps on my desktop at a glance. I do not mind it being refreshed every 10-30 mins or when it becomes >20% visible. I just want to see what's the cloud cover and where it is heading towards.
 
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