MacOS Catalina removes Dashboard, Apple’s kinda useful widget feature

Remember widgets?

Apple has quietly killed off Dashboard, its widget app, in its forthcoming version of macOS Catalina which was announced at its WWDC yesterday.

The discovery comes from Appleosophy, who found no sign of the feature when looking through the operating system, and no option to turn it off or on.

Dashboard was first introduced in 2005 in Tiger, as widgets became something of a hot new thing to have on your computer. 

These widgets had basic functions like telling the weather, a calendar, and a calculator, but you could add on new widgets that could tell you how warm your computer was, or play the radio, for instance.

The mid-2000s saw a bunch of widget programs released, including Google Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets (a.k.a. Konfabulator), and Windows Desktop Gadgets — all of which are since obsolete.

Apple stopped enabling Dashboard by default in 2014’s Yosemite, given Notification Center did much of the same thing as Dashboard anyway, and the feature gathered dust as the rest of macOS moved forward.

Even Dashboard’s look, the glossy gradient which was fresh more than a decade ago, seems outdated as the rest of Apple’s software adopted a flatter design.

While Dashboard wasn’t an oft-used feature for many people, we can imagine there are a few devotees out there who’ll miss the old thing.