Developer James Thomson of popular calculator app PCalc announced today via his Twitter account that Apple is forcing him to remove the app’s Today Widget due to a restriction that iOS widgets “cannot perform any calculations.”
Apple’s new Today Widgets feature in iOS 8, which allows developers to build functions into the system-wide Notification Center, does have some limitations that Apple outlines in developer documentation. For example, Apple encourages developers not to use Today Widgets for multistep tasks: “If you want to create an app extension that enables a multistep task or helps users perform a lengthy task, such as uploading or downloading content, the Today extension point is not the right choice.” There doesn’t, however, appear to be specific references to apps that perform calculations in Apple’s developer guidelines.
It isn’t the first time Apple has asked developers to remove widget functionality that interferes with its vision of the Notification Center feature.
The PCalc app remains on the App Store, but its developer said today that Apple has asked that the current PCalc widget be removed. [tweet https://twitter.com/jamesthomson/status/527498251176796160]
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But, apple provides a calculater app for yosemite? ….
I used to use spotlight to do calculations on my Mac multiple times per day. Since Yosemite moved spotlight to the middle of the screen, that is no longer very helpful for performing calculations using numbers that are in documents displayed on the screen. I’m thinking that maybe Apple added a Calculator widget to the notifications view on Yosemite because of the impaired effectiveness of using spotlight as a calculator.
Fortunately, there is a calculator on the Dashboard.
i actually share the same complaint. i used spotlight as my calculator all the time. i guess not anymore.
Use Spotlight, Luke!
Come on everyone lets raise hell on Apple like we are doing MCX and the CurrentC experiment!
Some things aren’t worth it, lol. Gotta pick and choose your battles mate… Nice try though.
Isn’t this because their widget is using code which the app guidelines prohibit?
I’m not a fan of using calculator as widget anyway. If Apple did it is because there is a good reason.
Great to see Apple take a stand. This is what keeps our iDevices whizzing along. Thompson is looking out for his own pocket … not Apple users.
Another casualty in the long line of arbitrary app review rejections. Why make PCalc the app of the week if you know it violates App Store guidelines?
Rather, why make it a “featured app”*.
It’s more likely they don’t want something as heavy as a calculator in the Today view so as not to have a slow loading widget or slowing down Today view in other ways. The widgets in Today view need to be very light and it might be the case that a calculator is just heavier than Apple likes. Obviously having a calculator in Today doesn’t hurt Apple’s interests in any way, so it’s likely they are looking out for performance and the end user.
Where is our herb? I was looking for him and i’m very suprised when i couldn’t see his comment on posts like this. Is he ok? 😊
There is a built-in calculator if you swipe up from the bottom (control panel). Why also have one in the notification bar?
I don’t have this on an iPad. And I like using on in Today View.
how lazy are we becoming? I will click one more time and get to my app / calculator.
If Apple had simply added a calculator app (through the Control Panel) to the iPad iOS, this wouldn’t even be an issue. Does Apple think that people that use an iPad never need a calculator? There is room right next to the Clock and Camera shortcuts to fit in a calculator. Honestly, I’ve never understood Apple’s rationale for not supplying one.
Agree 1000%. Especially after they made the one on the iPhone much less useful by removing the memory and memory clear buttons from the standard interface in iOS 7.
I think the issue there is that if they simply make their own calculator app for iPad, it would pretty much *have* to be different from the one on the iPhone which would be just ridiculous at that size, so rather than make an app that works for both, they took the easy way out.
I can kind of see both sides of this story. I agree that this calculator widget is useful, but I think that Apple are trying to keep things sleek and avoid the widget mess that Android can be. If they allow this calculator app to break the rules because it is actually useful, where does it stop? Widgets with adverts in?
Rgds,
Ben,
http://mytechramblings.com/
A calculator in the notification centre is useful in Yosemite, but much less so in iOS, so I somewhat agree with them to start with. The second thing is that the calculator on Yosemite allows the user to save a long list of calculations so if the iOS one does the same thing it could easily fall prey to the memory limit.
My suggestion would be to take out the copy/paste buttons and the memory and memory clear buttons as it seems that this might not only be the source of the problem, but also Apple clearly doesn’t like them.
They removed them from the standard calculator interface of their own product in iOS 7 making the calculator far less useful than it used to be, so obviously they have a “thing” about people doing more than one simple calculation at a time.
having easy access to calculator is great….just swipe it down…
This will be the end of Fantastical’s widget, as it is definitely “multi-step”.
I also have an Widget (Live Scores Widget http://t.co/eJNpcaCLO0). The last update is now for 21 Days “in Review”. I think Apple completely rethinks the “Widgets” :(
Here is a video link to this unreleased update: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGnL7d-eu1I&feature=youtu.be
Today is today… It’s a status page