Marc from iSlayer.com, the home of the best system monitoring widget known to man kind, iStatPro, emailed me yesterday with another slick dashboard/widget trick. This time we’re thinking outside of the box (ok ok, not a box, but the dashboard). Is there a widget you routinely use, but it interrupts your work flow to keep opening and closing the dashboard? Well Marc’s here to save the day once again. This time showing you how you can use a widget without opening the dashboard! Thats right, you can run widgets right on your desktop so they are available to you at all times.
- Open Dashboard (this can be done several ways, like pressing F12).
- Open the Dashboard tray by clicking the (+) in the bottom left hand corner of the screen.
- Click and hold on a widget’s icon.
- Press F12 to close Dashboard.
- Place the widget where you’d like it, then let go of the mouse button.
There are many uses for this trick as you will soon find. Pop the calculator out of the dashboard if your doing some number crunching and have to put the results in a document. If you need to resize a bunch of pictures quickly place ImageShackle on your desktop and away you go. Now you want to upload those images you just resized to ImageShack. Move your ImageShack Widget out of the dashboard and quickly upload the images one after the other. The possibilities are endless! If you’ve found this trick useful check out Marc’s other widget trick, Run A Widget Without Installing It.
iTunes Widget on the Desktop
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This doesn’t work for any of my widgets. Is there a setting to allow this?
I’ve always wanted to be able to do this, and now that Vista has widgets, we need to up the ante to continue to make the sorry PCers feel even worse about themselves!
What version of OS X are you using? I’m using 10.4 Tiger and it works with all my widgets.
Make sure that you are dragging a new widget out of the tray at the bottom of the dashboard. Don’t try to drag the actual widget itself that is already on your dashbaord. Use the icon in the tray :)
Good Luck
After placing a widget on the desktop, when you no longer need or want it there, what steps do you take to remove it from the desktop?
Thanx.
Just open your dashboard with the F12 key (or however you normally open it) and it will move off your desktop and into your dashboard. Then just remove it off your dashboard like you normally would. (ie. the ‘ ‘ in the bottom left, then the ‘X’ on the widget.
I guess I should have added that to Marc’s instructions :)
can i put the widget behind other programs like amnesty?
Nick,
Thank you!
Great Option!
Jeff, as far as I know the widgets stay on top of of the programs. I couldn’t find a way to put them under stuff. Amnesty looks really cool though. Seems like a more permanent way to put widgets on the desktop with a whole lot more options. Do you use it Jeff?
yup yup, i use amnesty.
it is very cool.
since i am in the middle of a format reload i cannot really tell you all of the stuff that i use until it is setup again, but right now i am using it and it rocks cause you can force them to the desktop.
Using OS 10.5 and this doesn’t work at all. When I click F12 to close the dashboard there is nothing being dragged anymore.