Apple Dashboard

Apple Dashboard is a mini-applications layer for Mac OS X, introduced in version 10.4 based on HTML, Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript. Dashboard has been widely compared to Konfabulator. In a nutshell, Dashboard is a platform for fastcoded mini-applications called widgets. By hitting the F12 key, a user can call up their collection of widgets, and the feature was once billed as an extension of Exposé.

Most widgets are customizeable by the user: preferences are shown on the "back" of the widgets and made visible by an animation. This animation is one of many associated with Dashboard—calling up Dashboard, new widgets being added, Dashboard disappearing, and actions of the widgets themselves may be animated—that some consider taxing and superfluous. Apple Computer has a history of oftentimes extraneous eye-candy built into their operating system. However, Apple's standard video hardware and Quartz graphics acceleration are adequate for the user to enjoy Dashboard in its full visual glory.

Widgets

Apple's current widgets include:

• Calendar
• Stock ticker
• Dictionary/Thesaurus
• iTunes controller
• Calculator
• Address book
• Weather
• Yellow Pages
• Translator
• Flight Information
• Unit converter
• Games
• World clock
• Stickies

Third party widgets can be installed, as well, and Apple provides documentation for developers on their site, and encourages them to share their widgets.

Criticisms

Auto-install

The feature of auto installation through Safari is recently under criticisms ^{[1] [2]}, as these widgets can access a user's personal files. There is no user interaction or notification during auto-install, hence malware could potentially be installed. Under the default settings in Safari, it is possible for a webmaster to have a widget automatically download and install itself into the Dashboard. With access to the Cocoa libraries, terminal commands and the permission set of the current user, widgets can wreak similar types of havok that ActiveX can on Windows-based machines. Further, there is no immediate way to delete a widget that has been installed. The only way to remove a widget is to manually delete it from a user's ~/Library/Widgets/ folder, something a novice user may not know how to do.

Ironically, a widget called Widget, The World Watcher has been introduced with the purpose of monitoring widget installations, with the intention of filtering out malicious installation attempts. The widget also acts as a GUI frontend for managing widget's on a user's computer.

An update to Mac OS X "Tiger" is expected to come sometime this month. The update, version 10.4.1, is expected to include quite a number of fixes, including the auto-install vulnerability.

Footnotes

1. ^  Dashboard Leaves Macs Vulnerable, (May 13, 2005).
2. ^  'Zaptastic' widget demonstrates Dashboard exploit, (May 13, 2005).

External links

• Apple's Dashboard page
• Apple's Dashboard Developer page
• Apple's Dashboard Widget download page