With all the public angst around spyware, worms, viruses, and trojans, and with all the negative reactions to Microsoft’s “Trustworthy Computing” attempts, it’s nice to see someone who not only reacts to what goes on on the net with an updated product that works, but also finds a way to make the system both secure AND usable.

Enter Apple. Tiger was released with a bit of fanfare, touting Spotlight and Dashboard as the two most important—and most valuable—features. Dashboard, however, quickly became marred by the realization from outside Apple that it was quite the security risk. Safari automatically downloaded and installed widgets and there was no built-in way to manage widgets. Many on the net proposed that this would usher in a flood of spyware and other malware via Dashboard on the OS X platform. Well, that hasn’t happened. Not only has that NOT happened, but Apple has solved all those problems while keeping Dashboard the friendly development platform it was built to be, all in the new 10.4.2 release.

Yes, there’s not a built-in widget manager. No, it’s not a Preference pane (the Mac equivalent of a Windows Control Panel). Instead, it’s actually just a widget itself, but it works just great. Widgets now prompt the user to be installed and upgrading prompts the user to replace—both good improvements.

The best improvement by far, though, is the “test drive” mode into which all new widgets launch. It looks like this:

Visually the user can understand that this widget is closed off, though perfectly usable, and there are clearly marked buttons to keep it or delete it. Underneath that though, Apple has adjusted the dashboard engine so that these widgets that are being “test-driven” cannot harm the system in any way. Score 1 for Apple.