Dashboard has been permanently pulled from macOS Catalina

Apple is scrubbing references to Dashboard from WebKit, the engine underlying Safari, hammering a final nail in the coffin for the feature ahead of this fall's macOS Catalina.

A changelog along those lines was posted earlier this week, Mac Otakara noted. While WebKit is open-source, the log's author is listed as Sam Weinig, an Apple software engineer.

The absence of Dashboard was recently noticed in probing Catalina beta code. The feature has been disabled by default since 2014's OS X Yosemite, but remains an option through macOS Mojave.

Apple first launched Dashboard with OS X Tiger in 2005. The technology brought first-party widgets to OS X, such as a calculator and a weather forecast — arguably laying some of the groundwork for iPhone apps in 2007.

The concept is now redundant on macOS however, since the Notification Center offers widgets without having to switch to a fullscreen overlay.

macOS Catalina will include features like using an iPad as a second display, a unified "Find My" app, and the breakup of iTunes into three separate apps — Music, Podcasts, and TV. Device sync will shift to Finder.

20 Comments

The Owl 2 comments · 6 Years

About 5 years ago

Please correct your article - the photo at the top of the page is of Launchpad, NOT Dashboard.

Roger_Fingas 148 comments · 8 Years

The Owl said:

Please correct your article - the photo at the top of the page is of Launchpad, NOT Dashboard.

Notice the highlighted segment of the image.

Appleish 714 comments · 8 Years

I accidentally launched it a couple of weeks ago. I thought I had traveled back in time for a moment.

hobnoble 10 comments · 17 Years

The converter is awesome. I still use it occasionally for currency, metric and volume conversions. I wish they would update its widget.

chasm 3590 comments · 10 Years

hobnoble said:

The converter is awesome. I still use it occasionally for currency, metric and volume conversions. I wish they would update its widget.

Well, clearly they won’t. Still, you do have some options. Check with the developer or other parties to see if they have a notifications centre widget that does the same thing, or just ask Siri on the Mac (or iOS) to do any conversions for you (this is what I’ve been doing for ages, works really well).