Dashboard

Dashboard is an application for Apple's Mac OS X operating systems, used for hosting mini-applications known as widgets. First introduced is a semi-transparent layer that is invisible to the user unless activated by clicking its icon in the Dock. Alternatively, the user can invoke Dashboard by moving the cursor to the user's preference.

When Dashboard is activated, the user's desktop is dimmed and widgets appear in the foreground. Like application windows, they can be moved around, rearranged, deleted, and recreated so that more than one of the same Widget is open at the same time, possibly with different settings. 

New widgets can be opened, via an icon bar on the bottom of the layer, by dragging a widget icon out into the layer. After loading, the widget is ready for use. Dashboard widgets, like web pages, are capable of many different things, often to perform tasks that would be tedious or complicated for the user to access manually. 

One example is the Google Search widget browser and performs a Google search. Other widgets, like Wikipedia, grab the contents of WebPages and display them within Dashboard. Some widgets using Adobe Flash or another multimedia authoring program) to create games just as if they were in a browser.