I love Dashboard, I have several widgets I can’t live without. Most of my users however, don’t even know what it is. I also love the Mighty Mouse but again, most of my users don’t understand how it works.
I’ve tried managing the mouse preferences to prevent Dashboard from opening when users click the scroll ball, but I can’t seem to get it to work for the life of me. The same applies to disabling the Dashboard application and all accompanying applications through Workgroup Manager.
I came across DashOff, an application for enabling and disabling Dashboard, but it requires user interaction and I want this to be automated. I finally gave up and decided to create an Applescript application called KillDash to run at login, to issue a “defaults write” command to disable dashboard.
I’ve set the application to run in the background so the only thing users will notice is their Dock relaunching when the script executes the “killall Dock” command to apply the preference setting.
I used ARD to copy the KillDash application to the /Library/Scripts/Finder Scripts folder, since I didn’t want users to easily find it, and that location seemed to make the most sense. I then used Workgroup Manager to add it as a login item to all of my computer groups.
Hopefully this will help if you’re in a similar situation.
