Once upon a time there was an application called Konfabulator. This little marvel introduced widgets to the OS X community.
It had a variety of features including the ability to view widgets right on your desktop without entering any sort of dashboard.
Fast forward a few years and we all have Dashboard pre-installed and therefore have no need for some obscure third party widget engine. Konfabulator is now Yahoo widgets and only resides on the most diehard of old school widget fan’s Macs.
However, with this change has come the loss of the ability to put widgets where you can actually see them: on your desktop. Enter “devmode.”
Try this: Type
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
into terminal (type NO to reverse the command).
Now either relaunch your dock (killall Dock in Terminal) or log out and back in.
You now have the amazing ability to drag widgets onto your desktop.
Just start to drag a widget around within Dashboard and hit F4 (or whatever your dedicated Dashboard shortcut is) and you can release the widget right onto your desktop! Amazing right? Not so fast. Another great feature that the Konfabulator guys thought of was the ability to keep widgets behind all other applications so they would indeed seem to be a part of your desktop. However, devmode keeps your widgets as the frontmost application. This means that they are permanently in the way and really more of an annoyance than a handy feature.
