Dashboard is a discontinued feature of Apple Inc.'s macOS operating systems, used as a secondary desktop for hosting mini-applications known as widgets.
Dashboard applications supplied with macOS included a stock ticker, weather report, calculator, and notepad; while users could create or download their own.
Like application windows, they can be moved around, rearranged, deleted, and recreated (so that more than one of the same Widget is open at the same time, possibly with different settings).
New widgets can be opened, via an icon bar on the bottom of the layer, loading a list of available apps similar to the iOS home screen or the macOS Launchpad.
[4] Alternatively, the user can choose to make Dashboard open on moving the cursor into a preassigned hot corner or keyboard shortcut.
Starting with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, the Dashboard can be configured as a space, accessed by swiping four fingers to the right from the Desktops either side of it.
From OS X 10.10 Yosemite onward, the Dashboard was disabled by default, with the Notification Center becoming the primary method of displaying widgets.
Dashboard widgets, like web pages, are capable of many different things, including of performing tasks that would be complicated for the user to access manually.
On sufficiently powered Macs, widgets will produce a ripple effect when they are opened, like a leaf falling onto water.
Dashboard widgets are created using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard includes an application called Dashcode, which is a more user-friendly way of creating widgets.
Another new feature of Leopard is called "Web Clip" which lets users easily create widgets from parts of a webpage.
[9] For example, during the WWDC 2007 keynote, Steve Jobs made widgets out of the following: the featured news headlines on Yahoo.com, the top ten most searched terms on Google, the Photo of the Day on National Geographic, the Dilbert comic strip, and the box office information from Rotten Tomatoes.