Mac OS X 10.4.1: Widgets: Conflict with Helvetica Neue; Dashboard crashs

CNET staff

Sept. 2, 2009 11:34 a.m. PT

4 min read

Conflict with Helvetica Neue Several users have noted an issue where text becomes unreadable in Dashboard Widgets when the font Helvetica Neue is installed.

When the Helvetica Neue font is present, Widgets will display text as outlined, with a thin, barely readable border. The problem has been confirmed on a number of system configurations.

MacFixIt reader Scott Rose writes:

"There is a major font problem when displaying any Dashboard widget from Apple, if you have installed Adobe's Helvetica Neue font on your system.

"Apparently, there is a conflict between Adobe's Helvetica Neue font and Apple's Helvetica Neue font which causes all of Apple's Dashboard widgets to have outlined unreadable text for their fonts.

"This does not affect any other application but Dashboard, and many designers depend on Adobe's Helvetica Neue font so they cannot simply uninstall the font.

Unfortunately, at this point, users will have to choose between having readable Widget text or having Helvetica Neue as an active font.

If you need to disable Helvetica Neue, open the Font Book applications (located in the /Applications folder), select Helvetica Neue, and click the "Disable Selected Fonts" button (showing an icon of a checkbox) at the bottom of the Window.

You may need to log out then back in for the changes to take effect and text to again become readable in Dashboard.

Dashboard crashing when switching locations Some users note an issue where Dashboard consistently causes system crashes after network locations are switched.

The problem occurs when users switch from, for instance, a home Ethernet connection to an office wireless connection, and make the appropriate location switch in the Network pane of System Preferences.

After making the location switch, the system and all applications work correctly until Dashboard is accessed, at which point the system experiences a hard freeze where applications and the cursor are unresponsive.

The only current solution is to restart Mac OS X after switching locations, but before accessing Dashboard.

Widget memory leaks Users note issues with excessive, swelling memory usage from various Dashboard Widgets.

One poster to Apple's Discussion boards, Farlander, writes:

"There appears to be memory leaks in various widgets or in the Dashboard itself. For example, the Weather widget, that comes with the Dashboard by default, starts up taking about 7-8 megabytes, but after a few days of staying there would grow up to tens of megabytes (after 2 days of running on my powerbook every Weather widget grew up to 60 megabytes and I've had 5 of them open - that's a whopping 300 megabytes just for the Weather!!!) It appears that each one of them takes more and more memory each time I activate the Dashboard."

As noted in our Mac OS X 10.4 Special Report, if you are experiencing significant system slow-down that can be realistically attributed to Widgets, you can end all Widget processes by temporarily killing the Dock. This can be accomplished by opening Activity Monitor (located in Applications/Utilities) and looking for the "Dock" process, then clicking the "Quit Process" button.

This will end all currently running Widget processes, which will not be re-activated until you again click the Dashboard icon and re-display active Widgets.

This process can also be accomplished with the Widget Manager freeware utility.

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