Dashboard

Dashboard was an applications layer for Mac OS X (starting with 10.4 "Tiger") that allowed users to perform small tasks in mini-apps called "widgets". It is based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which has been compared to Konfabulator.

Activated by clicking the icon in the Dock, a semi-transparent layer appears over the desktop, upon which the widgets appear. Dashboard became a platform for fastcoded mini-applications like calculators, weather-feeds, news-feeds, and graphical clocks, which became predecessors to early iOS apps for the iPhone.

Widgets
Widgets are small web pages housed in a .wdgt package that can be created with Apple's Dashcode widget creation software (included with Apple's Xcode). The stock widgets were:
 * Address Book
 * Business
 * Calculator
 * Calendar
 * Dictionary
 * ESPN
 * Flight Tracker
 * Google Search
 * iTunes Controller
 * Movies
 * People Finer
 * Phone Book
 * Ski Report
 * Stickies
 * Stocks
 * Tile Game
 * Translation
 * Unit Converter
 * Weather
 * Web Clips
 * World Clock

Discontinuation
Dashboard was phased out of macOS with the release of 10.15 "Catalina" in 2019.