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What do you use Dashboard for?

S

samcolson4

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 16, 2011
53
0
I'm curious.

Most of the time I have it turned off (through a quick terminal code) but I've recently switched it back on just out of curiosity to see if anything's changed since upgrading to Lion.

What do you use it for? Specifically on an MBP, where I've found turning it off to be the best allocation of resources...
 
Turned off. Been using it for temperature monitoring, fan speed, weather forecast, and stuff like that. At some point I decided that's useless and I rather have my memory free'd up.

I'll give it another go with lion soon.
 
I haven't used it since it came out with 10.4. In fact I forgot it even existed until I upgraded my mini to 10.5 a month ago. I'm going to look into disabling it to see if that helps improve the performance of my G4 mini. Anyone have a link to instructions on how to do that?
 
Translator, Dictionary, 5 Weather icons, iStat monitor, calculator, 3 world clocks, and 5 sticky notes.
 
warvanov said:
I haven't used it since it came out with 10.4. In fact I forgot it even existed until I upgraded my mini to 10.5 a month ago. I'm going to look into disabling it to see if that helps improve the performance of my G4 mini. Anyone have a link to instructions on how to do that?
Click to expand...

To turn Dashboard off:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

To turn Dashboard on:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

You have to restart the Dock after making either change for it to take effect:

killall Dock
 
And I thought I was the only one.

I think Apple will kill it off with the next release. Apps are fast overtaking any need we had for widgets in the first place.

I also think their basic refusal to have widgets in iOS is also an indicator of this.
 
I use it for iStat pro, A few stickies, WolframAlpha search and a periodic table. Although really when I think about it, I hardly use the dashboard and it is a fairly large resource stealer
 
TheJing said:
To turn Dashboard off:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

To turn Dashboard on:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

You have to restart the Dock after making either change for it to take effect:

killall Dock
Click to expand...

Do I just enter this into the Terminal?
 
I've used dashboard for years now, you can get a widget called dash quit or something so you can quit it when you need more resources. I have a 15" 2011 MBP that was released before the Lion variations on the F keys so I'm so stoked. Use it for stickies, istat pro and the converter
 
iStat (Pro on iMac, Nano on MacBook), Weather, Daily Comics, Translator, Currency Converter.

I can't imagine this going away without a replacement. Dashboard was a replacement for Sherlock and there is a need for these things. A Mac App is no substitute.

As far as resources are concerned, buy more RAM!
 
When I first got my MacBook Pro I kept it on because I planned on using it. However after a while I turned it off since I never used it. It wasn't that uh of a resource hog for me, but every little bit helps.
 
Dashboard these days is complete piss all compared to most processes, I would only quit if i need max battery life really
 
I like it for calculator, dictionary/thesaurus, unit convertor, quick temperature report and deep sleep widget. My Activity Monitor shows it as using about 30MB of memory (in SL), so I'd hardly call it a resource hog.
 
TheJing said:
To turn Dashboard off:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

To turn Dashboard on:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

You have to restart the Dock after making either change for it to take effect:

killall Dock
Click to expand...

This did not work for me to disable the dashboard in Lion 10.7.2
 
The problem with Lion now is that the dashboard has it's own page, basically destroying the main reason I used it for, which was a lot better in Snow leopard as an overlay.


Many times I would be on a page and pull up a calculator while still being able to view the webpage in the background...... Now it creates it's own page and is no longer an overlay.... Fvucking Hate it... Lion is a Mess and Snow Leopard is a better OS in my opinion
 
Go into mission control and untick the box saying "treat dashboard as a space".

Problem solved ;)
 
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