Dashboard. Pretty. Useful?

I want to like Dashboard. I want to use Dashboard. Once again, though, I am faced with the question of “how do all these things really help me be more efficient in life and work?”, and once again, I have yet to find an answer.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not totally down on Dashboard. I think the concept of Dashboard-like functionality has tremendous potential, but the current implementation misses scenarios that I feel would be truly useful. I hope Apple listens to feedback and evolves it.

The Bad.

No doubt about it, Dashboard is pretty, and it’s animated effects are very cool. My biggest problem with Dashboard is not the widgets themselves, as there are already some very nifty widgets out there already from clocks, to web searches, to system monitors. My problem with Dashboard is its user interaction model, which I believe is not only inconvenient, but very inefficient. In fact, I haven’t found a single use for Dashboard where it is more efficient or convenient than either:

1. a similar Menu Bar item, such as the builtin battery monitor, or Airport signal monitor, or
2. Quicksilver

For example, let’s take web searches. There are many web search widgets available for Dashboard now, from Google, to Amazon, to more specialized sites. To use these widgets, I must do the following:

1. Activate Dashboard with either a keystroke or mouse movement.

2. Target the desired search field. This is the horrendous part.

   If I used a keystroke to activate Dashboard, I now have to move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse, visually locate the search field, move the mouse, and finally click to activate the search field.

   If I used the mouse, I have to do everything initially moving my hand from the keyboard to the mouse.

3. Return my hands to the keyboard to type my search terms and press Return.

4. Typically, these search widgets simply fire off a url to your default browser, so at this point, Dashboard zooms off the screen, which is very pretty, but time consuming.
5. Wait for results in my browser.

Now, contrast that with searching a site using Quicksilver:

1. Activate Quicksilver via the designated hotkey and press space to activate the search term entry field.
2. Type my search terms and press Return.
3. Wait for results in my browser.

For me, the eye candy just isn’t worth it. I am much more efficient using Quicksilver. Plus, because Quicksilver integrates many other features, such as access to the Address Book, del.icio.us bookmarks, etc. I have a single point of entry into a lot of stuff I use all the time.

Next, consider “informational” widgets, such as a battery monitor, or Airport signal strength, etc. Most everything I want to see that falls into this category currently lives in my Menu Bar, including battery, airport, clock, [Adium][] status, and new mail count (via the very useful MacBiff). These same pieces of information are available via similar Dashboard widgets, but in order to view the information, once again, I have to:

1. Activate Dashboard via mouse motion or keystroke and wait for the widgets to animate into place. This is important because it is not instantaneous. Contrast it with Menu Bar widgets that are always visible!

2. Visually target the piece of information I am looking for after the animation has completed (or nearly completed)

3. Deactivate Dashboard, and once again, wait for the widgets to animate out of my way. If I deactivate Dashboard via the mouse, I have to then return my mouse to where I want it. If I deactivate via keyboard, depending on what key I have assigned to Dashboard, I may have to return my hands to the home keys.

This is in stark contrast to Menu Bar items, where all I have to do is:

1. Visually target the information. There is typically no mouse motion, keystroke or animation involved. All it requires is that I move my eyes to the Menu Bar and then back to where I was working on the screen.

Because of these things, at least for me, Dashboard doesn’t yet provide the right user interaction for the things it seems to be intended to do.

The Good

As I mentioned at the beginning, I think Dashboard has tremendous potential, and that it was released as a marketing tool before anyone at Apple really worked out how it can be truly effective. So here are some things I think Apple could explore for making Dashboard a very useful component.

1. Allow widgets to live outside the Dashboard screen if a user so desires. This would allow “informational” widgets such as clocks, etc. or even widgets requiring interaction, such as a web search, to be visible without activating Dashboard.

2. Allow hotkeys to be assigned to individual widgets. This would allow widgets that require user interaction, such as search widgets to be accessed quickly and easily.

3. Allow real Applications provide Widget-like alter-egos, either on the Dashboard or on the Desktop. This is my biggest wish, and is actually how I was imagining Dashboard was going to work.

   My basis for this is two-fold. First, I feel that window minimization to the dock in OS X is nearly a useless feature. Second, I have always felt there is a need for many applications to be able to have a second state, where they are transformed into a smaller widget-like user interface when I don’t need their full functionality. I would love to see, for example, the yellow minimize button transform Mail.app into a widget that sits on my Desktop in a corner and informs me about new mail arriving, current unread mail count, etc. in a richer way than Mail.app’s current Dock icon does. I get no additional usefulness from having the minimize button suck the main Mail.app window down into the dock, other than having the window out of my way, which can also be achieved via Command-H (Hide).

So, again, I hope that Apple listens to feedback on Dashboard and finds a way to make it into something as useful as the concepts it loosely embodies.

Tags: briancavalier | Dashboard | osx | reviews