Hmm, you know Dashboard, when you click that “+” icon at the botom left, it moves the whole black layer up, “pushed” by the aluminum strip which allows you to choose what widgets you want to add?
Well, have you ever wondered where the upper part of the Dashboard layer goes? Yeah right me too…
And here is what I discovered.
I use my MacBook Pro with an external 24″ LCD monitor, that sits above the laptop’s screen, which is the main screen: I have the OSX menu bar at the top of the MB Pro’s screen, and when I traverse it with the mouse, the cursor ends up on the second monitor just above (I don’t like horizontaly tiled screens). Like so:

Maybe it’s a bit unorthodox, but that’s the way (ah haaaaa) I like it.
So, when you invoke Dashboard and click to add new widgets, what happens? there’s this nice animation, the black translucent slides up… in the upper monitor! Check this out on the screenshot below (that’s actually a combination of the two screenshots you get when hitting COMMAND-3):

(click for a larger version)

So you see the trick? The Apple coders simply move the layer up, beyond the upper boundary of the main screen which, in most of the cases, gets unnoticed.

Actually, it seems to be a “feature” of some system-wide library, since iPhoto does exactly the same when hiding the “film strip” in fullscreen mode:

(click for a larger version)

Don’t you like clever/dirty hacks?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 12:38 CEST and is filed under Apple talk, Rants & Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.