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How do I customize my Mac Weather Dashboard widget?

Just picked up my new MacBook Pro yesterday. The dashboard came with Cupertino, CA defaulted as weather and time. I can't figure out how to get my home town as the default location, even though I marked it as such numerous times in the Yahoo weather page. Any suggestions as to how I can change this default setting?


Dave's Answer:

So glad to get this note. I constantly forget about the Dashboard capability on my Mac, for some reason or other, and always have a sense that everyone else does too, but obviously not. Still, I'm curious, do you, dear reader, use Dashboard on your Mac OS X system, or is it one of those forgotten features?

(Another one that precious few people seem to use but I love is Spaces. I permanently have six spaces on my Mac and find it a splendid way to organize my workspace, but then again, I've used virtual screen systems for over twenty years, starting with early X Window System Unix boxes...

Anyway, Dashboard is a pretty cool feature but in their zeal to make it slick and visually beautiful, I fear that the Apple team might have made it just a wee bit more complicated than necessary. That's what you're facing, and the secret is to know that buttons appear when you put the cursor over the specified widget. Let me show you, with the weather widget.

Here's the default Dashboard weather widget, as supplied by Apple (you can push F4 on your keyboard to get Dashboard, btw):

dashboard weather widget customize 1

Put your cursor over it, however, and a tiny little "i" shows up on the bottom right corner:

dashboard weather widget customize 2

Click on it and the entire widget swings horizontally around and shows you the "back", where the configuration is accessible:

dashboard weather widget customize 3

As you might expect, just type in the city, state of your current location:

dashboard weather widget customize 4

Click "Done" and...

dashboard weather widget customize 5

That's it. While the weather widget is powered by Yahoo Weather, it doesn't know anything about configuration changes you make on Yahoo's site itself, which is why you weren't having any luck with it.

Btw, Didja notice the little "X" on the lower left?

dashboard weather widget customize 6

Click on it and you're in the Dashboard management area:

dashboard weather widget customize 7

You can move around to see what widgets are available (you can also install new ones from the Dashboard Widget repository at Apple, fyi) and if you did want a second weather widget with the weather in another city, you could just click on the weather widget icon. It shows up with a very cool visual effect:

dashboard weather widget customize 8

And now you can customize it just as you customized the first widget, unless you really are interested in the weather at Apple's Cupertino HQ.









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Comments

I have an MBP with OS X 10.6.7. I have set up weather widget for 6 cities; three from US and three international ones. The weather widget keeps on moving up or down. I guess that is related to the clouds or snow displayed in the weather widget.

Any way to make it stick on the screen and not move it? I have ample room on top of each widget for clouds or snow.

Posted by: NewBee at June 19, 2011 6:53 AM

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