I really like OS X’s dashboard feature, it is great to have an extra layer of information available just by moving the cursor to the bottom-left of the screen. However, it is always on and if you are in need of leveraging as much RAM as you can¹, it can be a bit of a resource hog.

A bit of poking around online turned up a simple script which does the job of shutting down the dashboard nicely²:

set SwDash to display dialog "Change State of Dashboard?"¬
buttons {"Off", "On"} default button 1
if SwDash = "Off" then
	do shell script "defaults write com.apple.dashboard ¬
mcx-disabled -boolean YES; killall Dock"
else
	do shell script "defaults write com.apple.dashboard ¬
mcx-disabled -boolean NO; killall Dock"
end if

A fairly easy way to get back RAM, and the dashboard only takes a few seconds to reload when you want it back.

[Edit: there seems to be an application too.]

Posted in iBook | Tags: apple, dashboard |