If you want to use Dashboard in El Capitan, this document is for you:
Dashboard is a collection of small programs, called “widgets,” that let you quickly do a wide variety of tasks such as checking stock prices, finding weather information, and more.
Oh, ok.
Note: You can also use widgets in Today view in Notification Center. For more information, see Use Notification Center.
Harsh.
After months of waiting, I finally got my hands on a set of AirPods, Apple’s new wireless earbuds that were promised way back at the iPhone 7 event in September.
I’ve only had them for a day or so, so this isn’t a comprehensive review, but I wanted to share some initial impressions.
The AirPods are full of little touches of whimsy that make them feel a lot smarter than normal headphones:
All of this adds up to the AirPods feeling intelligent about their surroundings. Apple really thought all of these use cases through, and I appreciate it. The AirPods just do the right thing.
Pairing these things is easy. Open the case and push the button on the back. That’s it; your iOS device will ask you if you want to pair, and then the info about the AirPods is saved to your iCloud account, so you can quickly select them in Control Center on your other iOS devices, or from the Sound menu bar item on macOS.
Behind the scenes, this is all powered by Apple’s fancy new W1 chip, which is some type of superset over regular Bluetooth. The range seems way larger than my old Powerbeats.
It’s not perfect, though. I have had the AirPods drop chunks of audio, especially after switching devices. Taking them out and then reseating them in my ears has always cleared it up.
There’s probably no way around this: I think these things look a little goofy: 
Its like Jony Ive put his EarPods in a vice grip, sliced off the cable and elongated the stem.
I’m hoping they seem a little more normal over time, but at this point, I think I may catch some looks with them on in public.
They fit me pretty well. I never loved the EarPods, but I didn’t find them too problematic. These seem to fit a little bit better, thanks to the wire pulling them out and down being gone. As is the case with these things, your mileage may vary, since Apple doesn’t offer foam or rubber tips to change the size, like many other manufacturers.
The case is a joy to use. The lid is magnetic, and makes a lovely little click when it closes:
The whole thing feels solid and dense. I’m a fan, even if it does look like I could pull dental floss out of it.
Apple says the AirPods themselves will get five hours of battery life, while the case packs 24 hours of charge. I can’t vouch for the case battery life yet, but five hours seems pretty much right to me so far. Thankfully, just 15 minutes in the case will result in three hours of listening time, so charging mid-day on a lunch break shouldn’t be a problem for people using these all day.
To check the battery charge, simply flip open the case and a panel will slide up from Control Center showing the charge of the AirPods and the case.
The AirPods themselves also show up in iOS’ battery widget, and if it is opened, the case will as well. If you are using just one, the graphic on the battery widget will update to reflect that:
You can also ask Siri for the battery level of the AirPods.
The AirPods support just one gesture: a double tap. By default, this activates Siri on whatever iOS device or Mac they are connected to.
The double tap can be changed to act as a play/pause button, but Siri is probably more useful. Siri can change volume, skip tracks and more that the AirPods can’t do on their own.
This is a step backwards in usability from the in-line remote we’ve grown used to. I keep trying to double tap the AirPods to skip tracks. I think that muscle memory is from the old in-line remote, and I’m afraid it’s going to take a while to break.
My guess is that I’ll just pull my iPhone out to change something rather than talk to Siri in the gym. I usually have Internet access, but those who travel underground or on airplanes are going to be sad.
The AirPods are $159, which is a lot of money, but $40 less than the Powerbeats that I have been using up this point when working out or cutting the grass. I think the price is fair.
If you use your iPhone a lot, and you liked Apple’s previous EarPods, I think the AirPods are a great upgrade. They sound like their wired cousins, making the move easier.
AirPods are clever and fun, just like a good Apple product should be.
This fortnight on Liftoff, Jason and I talk about John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, and the oldest person to travel in space.
On Dec. 20, 1996, Apple announced that it had purchased NeXT:
Apple Computer, Inc. today announced its intention to purchase NeXT Software Inc., in a friendly acquisition for $400 million. Pending regulatory approvals, all NeXT products, services, and technology research will become part of Apple Computer, Inc. As part of the agreement, Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO of NeXT Software, will return to Apple — the company he co-founded in 1976 — reporting to Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio, Apple’s Chairman and CEO.
The acquisition will bring together Apple’s and NeXT’s innovative and complementary technology portfolios and significantly strengthens Apple’s position as a company advancing industry standards. Apple’s leadership in ease-of-use and multimedia solutions will be married to NeXT’s strengths in development software and operating environments for both the enterprise and Internet markets. NeXT’s object oriented software development products will contribute to Apple’s goal of creating a differentiated and profitable software business, with a wide range of products for enterprise, business, education, and home markets.
I’d argue that this is probably the single most important tech acquisition of all time. What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, but made the iPhone, iPad and more possible as well.
With 2016 (finally) drawing to a close, the Connected trio hop in their time machine and revisit the biggest tech stories of the last 12 months.
My thanks to our sponsor:
We’re taking next week off, but Connected will be back on January 3.
Apple’s CEO, in a posting to an employee message board that was leaked to TechCrunch:
The desktop is very strategic for us. It’s unique compared to the notebook because you can pack a lot more performance in a desktop — the largest screens, the most memory and storage, a greater variety of I/O, and fastest performance. So there are many different reasons why desktops are really important, and in some cases critical, to people.
The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.
Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops. If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.
He didn’t mention the Mac mini or Mac Pro. I’m sure he’s aware how long in the tooth they are, and praising them at this point would have been seen as a little ridiculous. I’m not going to sit here and read into these tea leaves and say that the Mac Pro is dead, but on the other hand…
Happy 3rd birthday, current Mac Pro specs! pic.twitter.com/ikZwH80kD2
— Joel Bernstein (@CastIrony) December 19, 2016
I take Cook at his word that Apple knows desktops are important to its customers. I hope that there are great desktop Macs in the spring, but I really don’t think the company should go longer than that without an update to at least the iMac.
Apple made a bad call in skipping two Xeon generations in the Mac Pro. I would like to think that if Apple had known Intel’s dates would slip as they have, we would have seen a new Mac Pro before now.
Maybe the iMac is hung up with Intel issues, too. Maybe the one guy working on the Mac mini retired.
All that aside, the clock is ticking, and has been for a while. These future Macs may be great, but a lot of people are tired of waiting.
I’m just surprised this watch isn’t beige.
Remember this?
Introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Dashboard was easy enough to explain:
Dashboard is home to widgets: mini-applications that let you perform common tasks and provide you with fast access to information. With a single click, Dashboard appears, complete with widgets that bring you a world of information — real-time weather, stock tickers, flight information and more — instantly. Dashboard disappears just as easily, so you can get back to what you were doing.
While not as flashy or important as Tiger’s keystone feature, Spotlight, Dashboard still enjoyed a big push from Jobs on stage.
A user could tap a keyboard shortcut or visit a hot corner and Dashboard would activate, dimming the screen and flying in widgets. Adding new ones could be done with a click of the mouse.
(My Titanium PowerBook’s GPU couldn’t render the water ripple effect that played when a new widget was added to Dashboard. However, college roommate’s aluminum PowerBook could do it without breaking a sweat. I was insanely jealous of him for about 72 hours after we both installed Tiger in our dorm room.)
Jobs pitched widgets as mini-apps that let you look up a quick bit of information without ruining your workflow or train of thought. They allowed for quick interactions. They were present when you needed them, and disappeared when you didn’t.
I remember being impressed at the demo, and even more impressed once I had my hands on Tiger, but John Siracusa wanted more:
I have one big complaint. Apple has unnecessarily linked two good ideas in Dashboard: the widgets themselves, and the Exposé-style layer where they live. While I really love the idea of a separate window layer for infrequently used items, I’m extremely disappointed that only Dashboard widgets can live there. To a lesser extent, I’m also disappointed that Dashboard widgets can’t be interleaved with regular windows, float on top of all windows, or be embedded in the desktop like Konfabulator1 widgets can.
I’d like to be able to put any application in the Dashboard layer, and I’d like to be able to pull widgets out of it and place them anywhere I want. This would require rethinking the Dashboard UI a bit (e.g., providing an active menu bar in the Dashboard layer) but I think the benefits would be well worth it.
Tiger came with these widgets pre-installed:
10.4.2 brought a new first-party widget, named the Widgets Widget:
The Widgets Widget simplifies Widget installation, providing you with clear notification when a new widget is being installed. The easiest way to enable and disable widgets, the Widgets Widget also lets you sort your widgets by name or by date. (The latter’s a great way to tell the newest from the oldest widgets.) And if you find a widget you’re no longer using, you can also use it to delete widgets.
Woof.
The list of default widgets has changed over the years, but this is what a clean install of macOS Sierra includes.
After Dashboard launched in 2005, Apple published a huge library of third-party widgets. The first 1,000 were available in the first four months, and by the time Leopard rolled around, Apple boasted that more than 3,000 widgets were available for download.
The widget directory is still up to this day, listing some 1,900 widgets still around for download. My guess a bunch of them rely on web-based services that are no longer working, though.
One reason for the boom is that it is super easy write Dashboard widgets, as the environment is based on WebKit. Under the hood, a widget is just some HTML, CSS and Javascript. I remember making one for myself in just a few minutes that showed me a dogcow every time I opened Dashboard.
The core technology behind Dashboard has remained the same since Tiger’s introduction way back in 2005.
Perhaps the biggest addition Apple made to Dashboard was WebClips, which premiered in Mac OS X Leopard. This feature allowed a user to make a selection of a webpage in Safari and save it as a widget. These widgets would auto-update, so it was a great way to keep tabs on headlines or a sports score without having to leave it open in a web browser window.
In Leopard, Apple shipped an application named Dashcode. It made creating widgets simple, giving developers a visual workflow for putting assets together and bundling everything up as a .wdgt file.
Dashcode.app was last updated in July 2012. It can still be downloaded from Apple’s developer site, but doesn’t run on macOS Sierra. Many of its features have been rolled into Xcode, and re-used in tools to build webapps for Safari on the desktop and iOS.
So, uhhhh, Dashboard wasn’t an original idea.
Konfabulator was an existing third-party application that allowed users to place widgets on their desktops:
Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.
What sets Konfabulator apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today’s advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Windows XP and Mac OS X.
Apple Sherlocked this application, and Sherlocked it hard.
Arlo Rose, the developer behind Konfabulator Arlo Rose was not happy, according to a CNET article at the time:
“It’s insulting, is what it is,” Rose said in a telephone interview. “They could have at least offered to work with us or to buy it.”
Apple, for its part, maintains that Dashboard is the company’s own creation, noting that Widgets have long been a part of Mac OS X and the NextStep OS.
“The goal isn’t to be like anything else,” Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller said in an interview. “It’s not his stuff. What we’ve done is ours.”
Not everyone thought Apple ripped it off, however. Here’s John Gruber:
Bullshit. Dashboard is not a rip-off of Konfabulator. Yes, they are doing very much the same thing. But what it is that they’re doing was not an original idea to Konfabulator. The scope of a “widget” is very much the modern-day equivalent of a desk accessory.
The classic Mac OS shipped with Desk Accessories, which were small, single-purpose programs that could run alongside a user’s main application, even before the Mac could truly multitask.
Regardless of where the original idea came from, many thought Dashboard was a pretty clear clone of Konfabulator. The app’s website certainly said as much after Dashboard had been unveiled:
I can only assume Apple was aware of Konfabulator’s existence when developing Dashboard. While Sherlocking is something that happens, it’s always a little icky to consider.
Konfabulator was purchased by Yahoo in July 2005 and powered Yahoo Widgets until 2012 when the platform was shut down.
For a couple of years, I used Dashboard pretty heavily. I had all sorts of little utilities handy, but over time, it slowly faded from my workflow.
My guess is that’s the case for most Mac users. Slowly but surely, stuff that widgets were great at has been replaced by things like simple iOS apps or even quick Google searches.
Dashboard itself has faded, too. Starting with OS X Lion, Dashboard could be configured to act as a space to the left of the first desktop, accessible via Mission Control or a swipe. I remember the change, and thought at the time that it felt like a demotion for the once-impressive user interface and placement Dashboard had previously enjoyed.
As of OS X El Capitan, Dashboard is off by default on fresh installations. Notification Center has become the new target for Mac developers wanting to build widgets, and Dashboard’s dedicated media key on MacBooks and external keyboard has been replaced with one for Launchpad.
(You can add it back if your Mac has a Touch Bar, though.)
Every year, I think to myself that Dashboard has reached the end of the line, but Apple keeps surprising me.
Maybe someone important on the macOS team still really love Dashboard, or maybe everyone’s forgotten it’s still in there, deep in the codebase somewhere. Whatever the reason, Dashboard lives on, for now at least.
Update: macOS Catalina finally killed Dashboard in 2019, with the death of all 32-bit apps and frameworks.
More on this in a moment. ↩︎
Amazon Associates is an affiliate program that earns you commissions when you link to Amazon products that result in a sale. The trouble is, creating those links is a hassle on iOS. Associate, by Squibner, fixes that with easy-to-use search and link conversion.
Associate’s search functionality puts Amazon’s entire store at your fingertips. Run a search and tap the result you want. Associate does all the hard work of generating an affiliate link that includes your Amazon Associates credentials. Associate also has an extension for generating links from within Amazon’s own app or any other app where you find an Amazon link. Associate grabs the link and converts it into an affiliate link in just one tap.
Associate is available on the App Store for $4.99 and works with every region supported by the Amazon Associates program: US, UK, China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, India, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.
Unlike the other three books I’ve looked at recently, AppleDesign was not published by Apple.
Put out by Graphis, Inc in conjunction with Apple in 1997, AppleDesign is 287 pages of wonderful photography not only of finished Apple hardware, but prototypes, design mockups and more. The first third of the book is dedicated to an in-depth retelling of the processes and decisions that went into what Apple had made up to this point. The Apple II to Snow White grace the early chapters, then the book shifts to things like early Power Macs and the Newton line.
