The Mysterious Case of the Wandering Widgets

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Level 1

111 points

The Mysterious Case of the Wandering Widgets

I have seven Yahoo weather.com standard weather widgets on Dashboard for separate locations (sad, I know, but there it is!).

I also have several other widgets of varying use, some OSX standard and some extras.

Alone of these, the Weather Widgets frequently move whenever I reboot, usually downwards but randomly and not in nice military marching unison.

Why is this happening and how can I stop it? It's a pain in the fundamental orifice having to straighten them up each time as they frequently move to overlap other widgets.

Usually I run 24/7 to give Folding@Home the best advantage, but recently I've been rebooting each morning due to extraneous external circumstances.

27" quad-core i7 iMac, 1TB HD, 4GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.6.3), Also G4 eMac and G4 Tower

Posted on Apr 23, 2010 12:45 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 23, 2010 1:50 AM in response to iBozz

That’s a known bug and believe me, it is still annoying even if you have only one weather widget open. 🙂
You too should tell Apple about it so this problem hopefully gets more attention:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

If you’re an ADC member you can also use:
https://bugreport.apple.com

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Answer 2

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Apr 23, 2010 4:54 AM in response to iBozz

When in the Dashboard, press command-shift-4, then (when the crosshairs cursor appears) press the space bar. This lets you highlight a window to take a screen shot of, but in the Dashboard, a neat side benefit is that it shows you the boundaries of your widgets when you put your mouse over them. Widgets sometimes have empty space around them that is considered part of the widget. The Dashboard doesn't like overlapping widgets, and will move them when it starts up if they do. Make sure that none of your widgets overlap, using this highlight to see where the boundaries of each one are.

When you want to exit screen capture mode, without actually taking a picture, just hit escape.

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Answer 3

Apr 23, 2010 8:01 AM in response to thomas_r.

Thomas, this is a known weather widget bug. I use it on my 30" CD and it has loads of free space around it.

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Answer 4

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Apr 23, 2010 9:32 AM in response to Björn Herrmann

What I just posted is a known fix. It fixed the problem for me. Ever since I repositioned my widgets, being mindful of the actual borders of each widget, my weather widget has been fixed in stone.

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Answer 5

Apr 23, 2010 9:45 AM in response to thomas_r.

Hmm, I believe you. But I have heard this from so many people where this fix does not work, and I’m one of them. I just double-checked with the screenshot trick, but as you can see...

PS: The other widgets around it all just have an invisible border of a few pixels. They aren’t even remotely close. In my case the weather widgets moves straight down a few pixels everytime the Dock process has been relaunched.

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Answer 6

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Apr 23, 2010 9:58 AM in response to Björn Herrmann

I have heard this from so many people where this fix does not work

That's no reason not to try it.

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Answer 7

Apr 23, 2010 10:08 AM in response to thomas_r.

That’s correct. But I did try a long time ago and just did it again. 🙂 I don’t know if my observation is correct, but it seems that the widget does not move every single time the Dashboard is completely restarted, but it does for me most of the time and the problem obviously isn’t missing free space around it.

That’s all I can say...

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