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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it's the end of the road for my Dashboard usage. I know it's basically been deprecated for years, yet it remained vastly more useful for me than it's replacement in Notification Center

It was still the fastest way to access:

- Multiple calculators

- Multiple sticky notes

- Multiple unit conversions

- Stocks

- Weather widgets

Notification center as currently implemented is just not cutting it. The amount of widgets I can quickly access is dependent on screen size, and worse, they're moving targets! — The weather widget causes all the ones below it to shift up and down while it loads. Not to mention I can't see my notifications when in Widget mode.

What a sad state of affairs for what was once a very powerful feature.

EDIT: For fun here's Steve Jobs' intro to Dashboard widgets https://youtu.be/XQQPTtdzBig?t=4872

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Funny, I find the exact polar opposite.

When I four-finger swipe left for Dashboard, stocks and weather take several seconds to load, and to use the calculator I actually have to click inside of it. And visually they all look like toys that bear no relation to current OS look and feel.

Two-finger swipe-left from right edge brings up Notification Center with weather and stocks always instant (so much faster), and I use cmd-Space for Spotlight for all calculations and conversions without having to click/tap ever, just using my keyboard. And since Spotlight allows me to type complex math expressions with parentheses, I've never had a need for multiple calculators. And then Stickies has a dedicated app.

So except for multiple unit conversions (which I've never needed)... I'm personally very glad we've moved on from Dashboard.

> and I use cmd-Space for Spotlight for all calculations and conversions

Hot damn! That's the most useful thing I learned today!

i had been using spotlight for simple calculations for years, but i stumbled onto conversions (like "528 in2 in sq ft" or "32c") only a couple months ago. if you don't specify to the units you want, it will still give you a most likely conversion unit with less common ones down below. it's super useful and quick!

I've developed my own widgets for personal use, that you can pry from my dead fingers. Or when I decide that any desktop or laptop that came out post-2009 is sufficiently not infuriating. Sincerely, have fun. And good luck. Bless your heart and all that crap.

I've replaced Spotlight with Alfred [0]. Well, just the cmd+space shortcut. I've built a few "workflows", which are sort of like plug-ins/macros/shortcuts/etc. I can do things from emptying the trash to running one-off Terminal commands and from generating a randomized password to converting RGB color codes to hex. The free version is plenty useful, but I don't regret purchasing the lifetime upgrade.

[0]: https://www.alfredapp.com/

Dashboard was a clone ("Sherlock") of Konfabulator, a third party app. It looks like Konfabulator was acquired by Yahoo but eventually shut down. Maybe this is once again an interesting third party opportunity?

I can't even recall how to invoke Dashboard. The fact that was always hidden meant I never used it.

There used to be a doc icon and even a physical key for it.

There was a keyboard shortcut, or you could multi-finger swipe to it.

I was the author of a Windows competitor named Kapsules back when Konfabulator was hot and before the buyout by death knell by Yahoo!. (I tried to go with Winfabulator but they didn't take too kindly to that - I was young and ignorant.)

This was a space that was useful, and then became saturated and commercialized to the detriment of usefulness. It was just before we had good off-screen rendering, right as the html-and-js-as-desktop-apps was starting to take off, and when transparency in window rendering was still difficult. I could share a lot more thoughts

Is there an opportunity to fill the void? I'm really not sure. Bear in mind that this was well before the iPhone hit and smartphone apps got huge. Most of the things we did with widgets back then are far easier done on our phones now. Kapsules had some good parity with what Konfabulator and Apple Widgets had offered, and I can't name a single widget for Kapsules, aside from the silly barking hamster, that doesn't ship by default with our phones now.

The widget craze was a fun phase of app development, and no doubt influenced UX and mobile apps, but I consider it merely an interesting footnote now. If anyone is interested in the source code for Kapsules, I can probably dig it up from one of my old HDDs. It was written in C# on .NET 4.0.

What's your take on Android widgets? I used to think they were all I ever wanted in a system only to use them less and less with every iteration of the OS, now fewer and fewer apps come with widgets, or even try to use them for something really useful. Has the user lost the appetite for at-glance desktop tools?

Great observation. I've been an Android user since the Galaxy Nexus; from my own personal experience, I think they've lost relevancy as really fast and easy app switching is available, and we populate our various launcher screens with more and more app icons/shortcuts. Apps also have really good notification bar "widgets" now that seem to be the preference (e.g. Spotify, Pandora)

It's also a similar concept to "desk accessories" from the original "System 1" Mac OS.

The ability to hit a shortcut key and run mini applications in a separate layer was part of Apple’s GS/OS for the Apple //gs back in the mid 80s.

> Multiple calculators

I missed multiple calculators by default as in Windows. I found a simple Apple Script accessed with 'mcalc' that made this a bit easier for me.

  do shell script "/Applications/Calculator.app/Contents/MacOS/Calculator -background >&/dev/null&"

http://www.markc.me.uk/blog/files/MultiCalc.html

Thank you!

I use multiple calculators for quick reference and when testing various implementations of my work, and was baffled that Apple explicitly stopped my from doing that with their stock calculator.app

try

   open -n /System/Applications/Calculator.app

works for me

This thing has been disabled by default for 5 years now.

Edit: and fun fact, if you hate Electron, don't go looking under the covers of Dashboard... it's tons of old-school web tech cruft. Fun, if you're into it.

I do my calculations and unit conversions from within spotlight search itself. I can type cmd-space "1000 yen in euro".

Also siri can be configured to have text-only input. a long hold of cmd-space will pop up an additional window where I can type "weather in london" or "time in london" etc.

You can now use Spotlight for calculations and the notification side bar for the widgets. Its way better

I'm also sad they removed such as nostalgic feature but since years Apple is trying to remove it or at least make it less prominent. I guess its just a sign of times and how usability and trends change over the years. :(

I’m always using Dashboard to pull up dates on the calendar and the time in different zones. What is the Apple way?

How can they toss away a fundamental part of the OS? Steve just presented it back in Tiger. This and tossing 32 bit apps to the wind. Crazy Apple.

Tiger came out 14 years ago. Dashboard has barely seen any investment since then. Calling it a "fundamental part of the OS" makes me think you're trolling. This isn't the least bit surprising.

(And I'm sure a 3rd party replacement will pop up, if there are enough frustrated users).

Maybe they could call it Konfabulator.

Bar gaming, most serious apps have gone 64 bit and gaming was never more than niche on Mac.

There are a lot of legacy apps which are still useful and not 64 bit. I have a license for Aperture and Logic Pro for instance. I use Aperture daily and it meets my needs perfectly. Now I need to find a solution. I don't see why they couldn't include an optional compatibility mode forever. Even if it were something I had to download and install.

Dashboard was simply a way to get basic mobile apps prototyped on Mac before iOS existed. Apple does this a lot - make hay about something that's foundational to their next step.

A good example was usage of LLVM on the PPC->Intel transition which then helped when they ported OSX to ARM (ie, iOS, nee iPhoneOS).

Another is Safari (which was useful/needed on Mac at the time) but more importantly was critical in making the iPhone successful - mobile browsing sucked before the iPhone.

> A good example was usage of LLVM on the PPC->Intel transition which then helped when they ported OSX to ARM (ie, iOS, nee iPhoneOS).

I’m not an Apple insider, but I don’t believe LLVM played a substantial role in either the PPC-to-x86 or x86-to-ARM-for-iOS ports — the former was accomplished with Rosetta and a lot of bugs.

The current rumor, OTOH, is that Apple’s collection of LLVM bitcode for apps is intended to allow painless migration for applications when macOS is switched over to ARM.

Isn't that rumor solidly debunked by the fact that LLVM bitcode is strictly tied to the cpu architecure and kernel/system ABI which varies quite a bit between arm/arm64/x86/x86_64?

Has anyone been able to execute built-for-x86_64 bitcode on aarch64 ever?

Yes and it was debunked by no less than Chris Lattner himself on the Accidental Tech Podcast.

https://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript

Oh well, I guess the rumor is junk then.

I will say, however, that executing LLVM bitcode on different targets than the compilation machine is a subject of active research. It's one of the things that I work on in my day job.

Relevant quote:

Bitcode is not [12:30] a magic solution, though. You can't take a 32-bit app, for example, and run it on a 64-bit device. That kind of portability isn’t something that Bitcode can give you, notably because that is something that's visible in C. As you're writing C code, you can write #ifdef pointer size equals 32, and that’s something that Bitcode can't abstract over. It's useful for very specific, low-level kinds of enhancements, but it isn't a panacea that makes everything [13:00] magically portable.

What’s funny, is later on after Apple shipped a 64 bit chip for the Apple Watch. He admitted that forcing developers to ship watch apps as bitcode allowed Apple to recompile all of the third party Watch apps on the fly to support it, he knew that was coming, but couldn’t say anything at the time.

https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/1046960724646465541

The bitcode requirement was driven by the Apple Watch launching with a 32-bit ARM core, but Apple knowing they would move to AArch64 3 years later and not wanting to make devs recompile their apps (or have to support both ISAs on the Watch). The ABIs were designed to be compatible, and apps in the store were statically recompiled to AArch64 for the S4 launch last year.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's not regular aarch64, but instead a 32/64 hybrid called arm64_32 ?

It’s not a fundamental part of the OS, it’s a feature they pushed 12 years ago that never ever got any traction. User apathy towards Dashboard has been used as a darkly humorous but sad metaphor both inside and outside the company for many years now. Continuing to maintain things that have hardly any user adoption would be crazy. Better to take it out then leave it in as an attack surface and something that no engineer would ever want to work on. Many many more people know about Dashboard through jokes about how nobody ever uses Dashboard, than there are people who actually use Dashboard.

Similarly, someday MS will remove live tiles from the start menu. It’s inevitable, but clearly internal politics are keeping the feature around. Guaranteed that 99% of humanity will rejoice when it happens, but equally guaranteed that someone on HN will express how appalled they are that a company as big as MS didn’t choose to keep the feature alive for the sake of the handful of people who liked it.

Pretty sure the person you're replying to was being sarcastic. (Tiger was released in 2005, before Intel Macs.)

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