Butterscotch Tutorial Special
Switching to Mac
Part Seven of Ten: The Dashboard
Today, part 7 of our 10 part series on switching from the PC to the Mac, we’re going to look at the Dashboard.
Now the Dashboard on the Mac is equivalent to the Side bar that first became available on Windows Vista. But the Dashboards has been around for quite a while.
Now here’s a Windows Vista Virtual Machine and here is the Side bar. Now the Side bar has tools that are called gadgets and this one shows System Performance, here’s a calendar, a clock, something for the Stock Market and you can download new gadgets that are of interest to you from the Internet.
Now on the Mac, the Dashboard can be activated in the variety of ways. One is to click on the icon, it’s in the Dock, and to remove it, you can click on the same icon. By the same token, on newer Macs, you can press F4, some older Macs use Function F12. And it’s interesting to note that in expose, you can program which key activates Dashboard, you can also determine which mouse key can activate Dashboard and you can even set a hot corners, if you watch my mouse cursor, there’s my Dashboard.
And here’s my Dashboard, I have a variety of things here, some things so I know when the Football Game starts, several news, things, a calendar, my remember The Milk, Stock Market and so on.
Now if there’s any item on here that I decide I don’t want, I can change the things on my Dashboard. Click down here on this X and up comes the things for managing my Widgets. There are gadgets in the Windows and Widgets in the Mac.
So for example, if I wanted to add a new Widget, I could download Widgets from the Apple Website or here’s one that I already have for Facebook, click that, it’s active. I can bring it down to where I want it to be. By the same token, you can rearrange all of the Widgets on your desktop so that they’re where you want them.
If there’s a Widget that you decide that you don’t want, you can simply click the X and it’s removed. When you want it too go out like this, you can click the X, your Dashboard’s still there. To get out of the Dashboard, you can either press the same key that you used to activate it, press the mouse button you used to activate it or you can click on the desktop.
And that’s the Dashboard on the Mac and that concludes part 7.
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