I know that there are a lot of ways to launch Dashboard. You can use hot corners in the System Preferences, Dock, Menu Bar, Desktop, hot keys etc....
But here's yet another way to launch Dashboard -- you can launch it from your browser, any browser!
Here is what you need to do set it up:
- If you can get pass this first step, you are there. It is a difficult first step, so take a deep breath. If you don't have Internet Explorer, download and install it. You can throw it away after you are done with it, but you might just want to keep it around as a souvenir of an extinct browser. There maybe an easy way to do this with RCDefaultApp, but it doesn't look easy.
- Once IE is installed, launch it and go to Preferences, navigate to Network, and then click the triangle to open that section. Select Protocol Helpers. There will be a window to the right of this that will have two columns, one for Protocol and the other for Application.
- You will want to add Dashboard to this by clicking on the Add... button. Another window will pop up. In the text box next to Helper for: put something like mydashboard. Click on the Choose Helper... button in the window, and select Dashboard as the application. Close the window, close IE (trash it if you must) and open your favorite browser. In this example, I will use Safari, but it works with any browser.
- In Safari, go to Show All Bookmarks (Command-Option-B) and select either the Bookmarks Bar or the Bookmarks Menu. Copy and paste one of the bookmarks. Give your pasted Bookmark a name such as Dashboard. In the Address Column, you will want to type mydashboard://.
- Double-click on the URL that you just created and watch Dashboard launch from the browser.
[robg adds: If you ever want to undo this trick, for whatever reason, you'll probably want to keep IE around. Note that you do not need to run the full IE installer to get it on your machine. Instead, just use Show Package Contents on the installer, open the Contents folder, and then expand the Archive.pax.gz folder. Inside that is the IE application; I dragged this to my MacBook's Applications folder, and it worked just fine for this hint. This hint works, but in all honesty, hitting F12 seems oh so much simpler!]

