YAMT, Yet Another Mac Tip
Browsing MacUpdate late last night for some universal binary goodies, I ran across a rather neat application. Bye Bye Dashboard lets you disable the dashboard, which is notorious for being a system resources hog. I can see this type of thing coming in handy for the IT guy that wants to make all the Macs he rolls out as efficient as possible. A company boss might also find this handy to get rid of time-wasters like my favorite Sudoku widget.
For whatever reason you might want to disable the dashboard, whether it be productivity or performance, this is the only application I’ve heard of that can do that. And for those times when you need to take a break with a widget or two, Bye Bye Dashboard does let you enable the dashboard, it’s by no means a permanent solution.
Nice one Paul. I researched this, as a recent switcher, when I had decided that there are way too many weather and stock things on the web to require system resources for them as well.
What I found is that the dashboard doesn’t use any resources, until you click on it the first time and it loads widgets. For this reason, I never installed a disabler.
Then I found mondoDock, which is the only one I use, and I really love having it.
Chad, mondoDock is cool, I’ve never seen that before. Though it’s more likely i’ll be installing the disabler — i’ve never really been able to find a decent use for the dashboard.
Nice tip! I just upgraded to Tiger on my 450 Mhz PowerMac G4, and believe me, Dashboard needed to go! TinkerTool does the trick too, and comes along with a whole lot of other great Mac OS X tweaks.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/5721
In any computer/OS, you should have at least the option of disabling everything, if you want to do any job on the computer you already have way to many distractions (mail/im’s/system popups) and resource hogs (everything else you have running that’s not needed at that point), hell if you need photoshop you open photoshop…you don’t let it run all day ^_^
Hi Paul. I saw on k2.infiity.com that you had made a deviance theme for k2. I was wondering whether thats still available or scrapped.
There’s a simpler way to do this: just type
in a Terminal window to disable Dashboard.
Somehow Dashboard widgets never quite lived up to the widgets I used with Konfabulator, but in the end it’s all about the resource usage; I need every ounce of power out of my 12′ Powerbook.
OnyX also lets you disable Dashboard, among other things. Kind of like TweakUI for the Mac.
OnyX 1.6.9
Nice site, Paul. I take it you’re Greek?