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Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update
kenthorvath was one of many readers to note that "Apple has quietly released an update for OS X Tiger. New features include a widget manager for dashboard and some 200 bug fixes and enhancements."
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The widget manager would be neat if I hadn't already turned my dashboard off.
Dashboard itself takes about 20MB of memory. Each widget takes at least 20MB of memory. Most people I've seen have at least a half dozen widgets going (if nothing else, the default calendar widget, a notes widget, a weather widget, calculator, countdown...)
Six widgets and dashboard will take up a good 150mb of RAM right there. I'll save my 150mb of ram and use stickies, weather.com, regular calendar and the OSX calculator instead, thanks.
Dashboard could be potentially useful, but not if it keeps sucking up the resources it currently needs. And not if all people keep making for dashboard are widgets to replicate what OSX already has readily available (why would I use a stickies/notes feature in dashboard for 20MB ram when I could use the builtin OSX stickies at 9MB?).
I see a lot of people complaining on a lot of forums about this bug or that bug. Not that this isn't valid, but hoping that someone from the particular group at Apple will read your post is not a good way to go about getting your problem solved.
Step 1: Go to developer.apple.com and sign up for a free (as in beer) membership (or sign up for one of the expensive memberships if you want free software, hardware discounts, etc).
Step 2: Go to bugreporter.apple.com and fill out a report. You'll have to give up some info about your system and *detailed* info about the behavior, why its wrong, and what needs to be different. And if you can isolate the problem to a particular configuration, it'll help them fix the bug faster.
These enter Apple's internal bugtracking system. Some of your complaints are duplicates of existing ones, but if enough people bitch about a particular issue then there will be more pressure to fix it.
There is no step 3! (er, profit!)
The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.