5 posts were split to a new topic: More complaints about Apple
I made myself a nice collection of widgets on my iPhone but when I swipe over to them itās almost always to check the battery levels on my airPods ā weather I check from the home screen sometimes but usually I want the detail that the Apple Weather app gives me (or the warnings that the Environment Canada Weather app gives me). The pictures on the home screen are nice and sometimes I divert into the cute but just about every other one is filler to me.
Not a big fan of the current MacOS version of widgets, though I used them a lot in their first iterationāespecially a great Magic 8 Ball widget.
On iOS, I recently discovered that my TOTP authentication app (OTP Auth 2.18.0) could display in the ātoday viewā widget. This is a real timesaver because I need to type a TOTP code at work over and over again. I had selected this app because it has a quick Apple Watch app, but looking at my phone is even faster.
Widgets are growing on me. I really like them on my Mac and find myself using or referencing them more. They are very nice for simple actions, like controlling home automation, or seeing the upcoming schedule.
That said, there are a lot of places for widgets to show up and I am not sure all are as useful as others. I am not a big user of lock screen widgets for example.
Overall they are a plus for me, but certainly not thing I value or use the mostā¦
Widgets? I dont need no stinkinā widgets!
(with apologies to Mel Brooks and by extension to B. Travenās novel)
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I do not understand Notifications. They pop up here, there and everywhere and often I do not know where they come from or how I have ever authorised them. ā In other wordsā¦ they are a pain because I do not understand how to control them.
But thenā¦ your āNotificationsā may not be what I understand about my āNotificationsā.
I keep Notifications asleep most of the time on my Mac, and probably would on my iPhone if there were an easy way to disable them. Widgets I never use on any device, and the Today screen?ānever knew it was called thatāI only get there by accident. Never use it at all and would switch it off if I could.
I would use an analog clock widget on my homescreen, if seconds were enabled on the homescreen. But they are not, and thatās probably to save battery.
In general, I wish Apple would let us disable lots of these bells and whistles, and if they did, I think we might be surprised at how much faster our Macs might feel. I have a mid-2011 MBA that runs Linux MInt 21.2, and it feels faster, and somehow seems to download from the internet faster, than this M2 MBA running Sonoma. That doesnāt seem right, and must be due to the deadweight of unused āfeatures.ā
Iāve tried widgets on my iPhone SE 2020, and on my old iPad Mini 4 when I had that. But I found them to be, at best, of superficial use. Iāve now gotten rid of them entirely.
Iāve got similarly mixed feeling about Mac widgets, theyāre nice to have but not that useful. And as my 2017 iMac cannot move to Sonoma I wonāt be able to find out if releasing them to the desktop will make me care more. 
I donāt use Widgets on any device. For me they are a solution in search of a problem.
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i agree about editing the lockscreen.
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On the topic of iPhone widgets, what is the fundamental difference between widgets in Today Viewās Edit mode that show up a) after clicking the + button vs. b) those that show up under Customize?
The difference are that the ones with the plus at the top are new style widgets that were introduced with iOS 14, which can go on the today view or the Home Screen, vs. the old style widgets that were only available on the Today view on iOS versions before iOS 14. Those apps just havenāt updated their widgets yet, or the apps just never removed the old style. (There may be things the old style could do that the new ones canāt.)
The word widgets means nothing to me, and it never has. It seems like everybody who responded knows what they are except me. I think you are talking about tiny apps that can be pinned to places like the Home Screen and Lock Screen on the phone. I havenāt really seen them on the Mac. I donāt understand their usefulness. I donāt know where they are, how they got there, or why they arenāt called apps. Customizing all this is deeply mysterious to me. Perhaps I need a Take Control book.
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I am massive;y annoyed at what they did to widgets, especially on the lock screen on iPads. I generaly keep it n portrait oriengtatio as all my financial stuff works much b etter that way. GThey do NOT allow us to position any widgegts hefre where wwe want (1 boo). They do NOT allow any use of widgets like we have for the ghome screen (2 boos). Especially annoyed there is no weather widget like the one I have on my home screen which imparts a lof more info (i.e. with a radar look) (3 boos). AND I get way ābetterā (i.e. more readable) widgets in landscape than portrait (4 and 5 boos).
Not at all impressed. Do not know if these same annoyances happen on Android tabletsā¦
[EDIT: Posted my actual ādo you use itā comments farther down.]
Widgets: Another category where the present-day Apple seems to be very late to the party (Android, Windows, etc.) and seems to be grinding through many of the mistakes of their competitors vs learning from them. Thinking different, or just not thinking things through? shrug
I have widgets set up on all three devices: Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Theyāre useful for quick glance stuff ā schedule, weather, stock market, pending deliveries. When Iām traveling, I through a travel-related widget on my iPhone screen to keep track of plane times, etc.
All in all, quite handy to have.
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Because I was having weird WiFi issues on my iPhone that werenāt resolved with a factory reset and restore, over the weekend I decided to try a reset and rebuild from scratch (which required the same on my Apple Watches.)
After spending time downloading apps and setting up home screens again, Iāve found that I like to use widgets as much for the info that they show at a glance as a clue for which of my home screens is showing. So Iām not sure I use the widget a lot to gather the info it shows, I still find them useful for navigating home screens.
That said, perhaps if there was the ability to customize the wallpaper of each Home Screen, that would be a better way to do this.
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Oops, left out my widget usage commentsā¦
Using pre-iOS 17 device, so no lock-screen widget features which would be more useful. I just have the Today View (right swipe from Home) set for Clock (analog), Battery (so I can READ the % without glasses) and the 2-widget-wide Calendar to see the next couple future events. Did not stick with any widgets on Home screen(s) as I use that for launching and if I have to swipe to get my most used items it may as well just stay on Today View.
Overall I rarely use Today View, but would benefit from and use those widgets much more if it were on the Lock Screen for quick, one-press viewing. But somehow we need a new device for that.
And even if you get that new device, you canāt really use any of those Today View widgets on the Lock Screen. What you do get on the Lock Screen are tiny widgets with minuscule font. I canāt read anything there unless Iād switch to a blank white Lock Screen background.
Yes, they are on my iPhone.
On my Today view I have:
ā¢ The local grocery shop has an app where you use a QR code to pay. This code comes as a widget .I have placed it on the top of my screen.
ā¢ Lightroom widget to take photos.
ā¢ A widget to go directly to buying tickets on the Oslo transport system.
ā¢ The real-time departure times for 2 often used stops.
ā¢ My wife is sharing her iPhone position. A widget shows me where she is. Clicking on the widget gets me right to her position on the map. In the summer, my fishing buddy shares his position and gets a widget.
ā¢ Today I have two yr.no widgets that show the current weather for my home and another place I visit often. Depending on the season, there might be more widgets for more places. The nice thing is that you get right to the place you are interested to see in the yr.no app when you hit the widget.
ā¢ I have 4 widgets that gets me to the 4 notes I use often.
ā¢ A Shortcut widget launches my website in Safari.
ā¢ A Shortcut widget that checks the rotation speed via ssh of the fan on my Mac mini that runs several Linux servers in VMware Fusion. If the speed is rising, it is time to restart the mac.
ā¢ A widget to launch Snapchat. I dislike Snapchat. I wish they did not, but my children use it to share photos and videos of my grandchildren ā¦
The game changing element is that many of the widgets get me to what I want to access with fewer clicks and swipes. As a bonus, 8 of the apps I use regularly have shifted from the second home screen page to the first. Since the widgets also get you to the apps, I have removed all those apps from the home screen.
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