Dashboard is an application for Apple’s Mac OS X operating systems, used for hosting mini-applications known as widgets. In this Quick Tip you’ll learn how to convert any Flash Movie to a fully usable Dashboard Widget. Let’s get started!

Step 1: Brief Overview

Using a feature of one of the most popular browsers, we will select and convert a Flash application to use it in the Mac OS X Dashboard.

Note: As you can tell, Mac OS X operating system is required to follow this tutorial.

Step 2: Choose a Flash File

Select the Flash movie or application that you want to convert, I chose this Snake Game from an ActiveTuts+ tutorial.

Step 3: Open Safari

Open Safari and navigate to the SWF of the selected Flash application.

Step 4: Select Visible Area

Press the Open in Dashboard button and select the area you want to be visible in the widget.

Click the Add button to open the selection in Dashboard.

Step 5: Themes

There are a few themes available to change the appearance of the widget frame.

Press the info button (the little i in the bottom-left corner) to display the available themes, choose your favorite and press Done.

Conclusion

You can open any Flash movie in Dashboard, this is an easy way to access your most used Flash files of the web with a single key. Try it!

Thanks for reading!