Lesson6.Keeping in Touch with Your World Using Dashboard

Lesson 6. Keeping in Touch with Your World Using Dashboard

Time	This lesson takes approximately 10 minutes to complete.
Goals	To learn how to set up different "widgets," so they'll automatically provide information you need from the Internet, along with other time-saving mini-applications to help you accomplish everyday tasks more efficiently.

The Internet is an amazing place for gathering information. It's especially useful for giving you instant access to commonly sought-after information, such as what the weather will be like today, how your stocks are doing right this minute, whether your flight's on time, and referencing online dictionaries and phonebooks. If you wind up doing at least some of these things every day (I know I do), you're going to spend a lot of your life staring at your Safari Web browser (the application we use on Macs to visit different websites). Well, rather than seeking out this information every day, and going to all these different websites, what if there was a way for this information to find you? For example, what if the weather report for your hometown was already waiting for you when you went to your Mac? And what if you also already had the weather for the cities your kids live in (providing, of course, that you have kids and they've moved out)? And what if your stock portfolio was already updated and all you had to do was glance at it? Wouldn't that be helpful? Too bad that kind of thing doesn't exist. Okay, I was baiting you. It does exist in Mac OS X Tiger's Dashboard. But Dashboard is more than just having your hand-picked Internet information waiting for youit's also one-click access to other parts of your world, like your Address Book, calendars, a lightning-fast dictionary and thesaurus, and even iTunes. Best of all, these mini-applications (Apple calls them "widgets") are just one click away (or one keystroke away, depending on just how lazy you want to be).