I have mac os x 10.4.11 — There are two yahoo widgets on my desktop–analog clock and weather that I did not put there and I can’t get rid of–I need the Jobulator one that I did put on there…How do I get rid of these — Macs have dashboard widgets so who needs them..
I haven’t done much with Yahoo Widgets (aka Konfabulator), but in the spirit of being helpful, I’m going to go ahead and download them from the Yahoo Widgets site, along with some sample widgets. Of course, since we hear so little about Yahoo Widgets on the Mac side of things (and, as you say, have Dashboard already) I don’t even know if it’s current and an active project there at the Yahooplex, but let’s proceed.
First things first, download and install. The install window certainly looks pretty, at least:
As it suggests, I drag the plug-in into the folder alias.
Then nothing happens.
What the heck? This is an installer?
What you need to do is go back to the Yahoo Widgets page itself and click a second time on the big yellow “Get Started Now” button:
If the plug-in is installed, it changes to:
Alright, let’s continue by clicking on – ingeniously enough – “continue”:
Since you’re installing some software into the system directory, you’ll need to type in your administrative password:
Oh, and don’t forget that, like so many other applications, you need to agree to a complicated and obscure license that I am guessing no-one other than the Yahoo lawyers have ever read in the first place:
You good? Press “I Accept” and after a moment or three…
Here you can see the weather widget showing the current weather this evening in Cupertino. If you move down a bit on the Yahoo Widgets Dock, however, you’ll see that there’s a little button associated with the weather widget itself:
Move the cursor over that widget control button and – poof! – new buttons appear:
Now you can see what you want: the “x” on the top left kills the displaying widget, even though the control button remains in the Dock, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, this is not great user interface design, but these little widgets are tricky to code too. Whatever the case, that’s how to do it…
The Weather icon remains in the dock after you close the Widget because the dock is expanded, showing all installed Widgets (note the highlighted “+” in the screenshot of the dock). If you click the “+” in the dock, it’ll collapse, showing only running Widgets.
For closing Widgets, you can also right/control click on the Widget itself and select “Close Widget” from the contextual menu.
More on this is written up in the help pages for Yahoo Widgets:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/widgets/widget/general/general-13.html