Larry Ate My Widgets

Freddi wanted to see my Dashboard. I thought: sure, why not. I’d barely opened it—just long enough to catch a glimpse of all those beautiful, ultra-secret, deeply interesting widgets I never use—when Larry showed up. Larry is one of Gary’s permanently drunk companions who seems to live at my place, and before I could get a screenshot he’d grabbed the Dashboard icon and taken a solid bite out of it. Gone: Flappie, my virtual pet. Gone: the daily Buddhist wisdom widget. Gone: the little healthy-eating tips I’d installed with every good intention. All three were genuinely my favorites, which tells you something about what I was optimizing for at the time.

Dashboard is basically Linux for me. Twice a year I get completely obsessed with it—every advantage floods back at once. One-click weather check instead of looking out the window. A beautiful animated clock instead of glancing at the menu bar. A smooth blue Wikipedia widget instead of just Googling something and appending "wiki." I spend maybe one day using all of it with genuine enthusiasm, then I notice I haven’t pressed F12 in three weeks, my Mac mini G4 has gotten measurably slower, and every Flash page loads like it has a personal grudge. Dashboard gets deactivated. See you in six months.

I’m clearly not its biggest advocate. But I know it was the actual reason some people upgraded to Tiger—alongside Spotlight, which I do actually use. Maybe Nicki, Nicole, and Wichi can show me what I’m missing. Your turn. Make Flappie proud.