I really like the iTunes Dashboard widget, but if you have a lot of playlists (I have 150), it can take a long time to respond to any mouse clicks when you first pull up the Dashboard ... which makes it pretty ineffective as a quick alternative to using the iTunes interface.This time lag occurs because the widget updates the list of playlists when you first show the widget, and when you turn it over. I'm not sure why you'd need to update the playlists when you first pull up the widget, so I decided to comment out that function. So far, I haven't noticed any problems (comments are welcome).
Here's how to change it:
- Go to the Widgets folder (/Library/Widgets) and locate the iTunes widget.
- Either make a backup of the iTunes widget and perform the following changes to the original "system owned" widget (which requires administrator privileges), or simply drag a copy of the iTunes widget to your ~/Library/Widgets folder as suggested in this hint. This will allow you to make changes to your own copy, without affecting the original. Your copy will override the iTunes system-wide widget.
- Control-click on the copy of the iTunes widget you plan to change, and select Show Package Contents.
- In the window that opens, find the file iTunes.js. Open this file in your favorite text editor.
- Find the following code (should be around line 280):
function onshow () { if (iTunes) iTunes.updateIsAppRunning(); if (ourTimer == null) { updateDisplay(); // reload we just shown ourTimer = setInterval("updateDisplay()", 500); } if (running) updatePlaylists(); } - Comment out the last two lines in the onshow() function by starting each line with //, like this:
function onshow () { if (iTunes) iTunes.updateIsAppRunning(); if (ourTimer == null) { updateDisplay(); // reload we just shown ourTimer = setInterval("updateDisplay()", 500); } // if (running) // updatePlaylists(); } - Save and close.
- Open the Dashboard and create a new instance of the iTunes widget to notice the changes.

