Apple has done a lot of work with widgets in recent years. A new class of SwiftUI-based iPhone widgets debuted in iOS 14, were added to in subsequent years, became interactive in iOS 17, and have made their way to the Lock Screen, StandBy, and more.
But as the new widgets have evolved, Apple’s old widget system has continued to live on. All the way through iOS 17, you could use legacy widgets as part of your iPhone’s ‘Today’ view.
That’s changing in iOS 18, which officially ends support for legacy widgets on your devices and will disable them once installed.
It’s been seven months since Apple launched its Lock Screen with customizable widgets but Spotify hasn’t really ever been on top of launching support for Apple features quickly. In any case, it’s nice to see Spotify debut an iPhone Lock Screen widget for instant access to your library.
The Amazon Alexa app for iOS just received a highly anticipated feature with its latest update. Starting now, you can add the “Ask Alexa” widget in your home screen to talk to the personal assistant with only one click.
Design and branding studio TIN has created a series of beautiful new time and date widgets for iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 called “Timedash.” The app includes several different analog and digital clock widgets that also incorporate weather and step counting. There are 30 different unique combinations inspired by 70s wristwatches, ranging from fun and colorful to sleek and edgy.
Microsoft has released an update today to its To Do app for iPhone and iPad. The big focus of the new build is the three new widgets that make it easier to manage your schedule and To Do list.
The original Snake game first showed up in 1976 and it evolved and rose to even greater popularity when Nokia started including the game (Snake II) on its cellphones starting in 1998. Since then we’ve seen a variety of versions across lots of platforms. Now the original Snake II has landed on iPhone with the same number key controls thanks to widget support with the Retro Widget 2 app.
With iOS 9 being out for nearly five months now, you would’ve expected all the top video apps to already be including picture-in-picture for the iPad. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case with YouTube and a few others. If you’re feeling the hurt from not being able to catch up on your favorite YouTuber’s latest videos while multitasking around your iPad, then check out CornerTube, a new YouTube utility app focused on PIP. CornerTube lets users quickly jump into videos on YouTube, all the while enabling that missing PIP feature. It gets even better once you start utilizing the included Today widget in Notification Center and Action extension in other apps.
Apple opened the door to new extensibility features on iOS with extensions and Notification Center widgets in iOS 8, but mixing app launchers with the swipe down Today view was quickly disallowed by the App Store as we saw around this time last year. That policy has since changed and we’ve seen developers able to build better widgets like Workflow’s recent update.
Launch Center Pro has been working on its own Today widget, which puts actions like opening the Instagram camera or messaging a specific contact a swipe down away from anywhere directly in Notification Center. Expand Expanding Close
Workflow for iOS has become the go-to automation tool for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch users wanting to streamline actions on mobile devices, and now the latest version is ready to put its useful Today widget in Notification Center to work. Workflow originally launched last December after a number of high profile iOS 8 apps were being pulled from the App Store for doing too much with widgets newly made available in Notification Center, but Apple has clearly cooled off and decided that widgets that do more than present information are fine. Workflow’s new version highlights this as the updated widget can now run many tasks right from the swipe down Today view without launching the full app. The latest update also adds a few new actions as well as a new sync and backup service for workflows. Expand Expanding Close
Microsoft today released a new update to OneNote for iPhone that makes it a universal app, now OneNote for iOS. That means that the existing OneNote for iPad app is being replaced by a single, universal app that runs on both iPhone and iPad.
The benefit, aside from having a single version, is that the iPad app is gaining some recent features introduced in the iPhone app including a OneNote widget in the today view of Notification Center. iPad users will also notice a new “recent notes” section for notes made on either device, and landscape mode on the iPad now presents a column of page previews.
Tumblr is out today with a brand new version of its blogging and community app for iPhone and iPad. Version 4 adds several new features like the ability to create new blogs from your iPhone or iPad and create video posts quickly by pasting YouTube or Vimeo URLs into a new post. The update adds a new widget for the Today section of Notification Center on iOS 8 for quickly seeing which tags are trending on Tumblr when you’re not using the app and much more. Expand Expanding Close
Fantastical’s ability to parse natural language input and create detailed appointment entries on your calendar has always been the primary reason to use it instead of or in addition to Apple’s own Calendar app on the Mac. Apple Calendar has picked up some language parsing smarts in recent updates, too, but it still doesn’t match Fantastical’s control and real-time appointment preview.
Still, I say in addition to because Fantastical for Mac has lived in the menu bar next to your clock, WiFi status, and other utilities where you can quickly access it for reference or adding an appointment from anywhere in the OS. The menu bar app includes a compact month view calendar above a streamlined, scrollable list view of appointments and reminders, but sometimes it’s nice to stretch out and view your schedule in a different context.
So when Fantastical first debuted on iPad almost a year ago putting the efficient list view next to a larger full calendar, I wrote optimistically that “the iPad’s app design could spill over into a future version of the Mac app (maybe as a dock app rather than a menu bar app).”
What Fantastical 2 for Mac actually became is even better: the same menu bar calendar users know and love (but new and improved!), and a full-sized calendar app with an optional dock icon. Both have been designed with the aesthetics of OS X Yosemite in mind and loads of under-the-hood features and improvements including the ability to actually change which calendars you see based on your location. Expand Expanding Close
Launcher is coming back to the App Store, after a fracas with Apple late last year over the rules regarding widgets in the Today view of Notification Center. According to the developer, Greg Gardner, Apple has changed its mind on how widgets in Notification can function—something we’ve seen before. Launcher will be back in the App Store tomorrow.
It’s worth noting that the app was originally pulled because Apple said apps were not allowed to have widgets that launched other applications. Apple has seemingly had a change of heart, because the application is returning with the exact same features as six months ago. Read on for the full rundown on what happened.
Numerous, a dashboard app for tracking a wide range of numbers, is an iOS app gem in terms of taking advantage of Apple technologies and one of my favorite lesser known apps for that reason. Today a new version of Numerous is being released adding new channels including a Tesla channel for Model S owners as well as a Google Sheets channel for tracking numbers from spreadsheets… Expand Expanding Close
It seems Apple has ordered yet another developer to make changes to his app’s Notification Center widget even after it was approved for sale and adopted by countless users. Previously the company’s indecisiveness on the purpose of widgets led to an app called Launcher being pulled from sale, and a similar fate was almost met by the popular pCalc widget until Apple changed its mind (again).
The widget in question today was created by developer Greg Pierce and is part of the popular note-taking app Drafts. The app allowed users to create new entries in the app by pressing a button in the widget, which then opened the app’s composer (in the app, of course).
A new app called FingerKey allows Mac users to unlock their computer using Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint sensor on the iPhone 5s, 6, or 6 Plus.
That means you’ll be able to login to your Mac using your iPhone’s fingerprint sensor rather than typing in a password each time. The app takes advantage of Apple opening up the Touch ID sensor to third-party apps for logins after previously being reserved for unlocking the device itself and authenticating App Store and iTunes purchases.
The FingerKey app includes the ability to unlock multiple computers from a distance, 256-bit AES encryption, and a Notification Center Today widget for quick access.
The developer says that support for logging into Windows and Linux computers is coming soon as is a Pattern Unlock feature for logging in via touchscreen gestures.
We recently wrote about a similar app, which also used a Bluetooth connection, that allowed users to unlock their Mac using by knocking on their iPhone’s screen.
We learned yesterday from developer James Thompson that Apple had informed him that the calculator widget for his app PCalc, which had already been approved and even featured by the App Store, would have to remove the widget from the app to remain available for sale. The reason Apple gave, according to Thompson’s tweets, is that “widgets on iOS cannot perform any calculations” which his PCalc calculator widget obviously did, but it seems Apple has since reversed that decision, according to iMore and TechCrunch. TC reports that an Apple spokesperson has confirmed that PCalc’s widget can now remain as well as any other similar calculator widgets. Expand Expanding Close
Fantastical for iPhone and iPad, the alternative calendar and Reminders app from Flexibits, received a major feature update today for iOS 8 users. If you’re unfamiliar with Fantastical, the ability to turn text input like “Dinner with Tim tomorrow night at 7pm” into a calendar appointment without fiddling with menus and dials is it’s killer feature.
Fantastical for iPhone received an update last month which optimized the user interface for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users, and today’s new version adds a Today view widget in Notification Center, an app extension for use in other apps, and interactive notifications for responding to alerts without even opening the app. Check out the new features in the latest version of Fantastical for iPhone and iPad below. Expand Expanding Close
With iOS 8 launching yesterday and the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus hitting stores and delivering to customers tomorrow, a number of apps have already begun shipping updates to take advantage of the new screen sizes and software features. With several customers asking where the update for Fantastical 2 on iOS 8 was, Flexibits today shared in a blog post its plans for the iPhones 6 and new version of iOS.
The makers of the smart calendar app note that the current version of Fantastical 2 has already been released with iOS 8 support and that a version of Fantastical 2 optimized for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus has today been submitted so users of the new device won’t have to wait long for the new version. More importantly, a version introducing a Notification Center widget and system extension will be “coming in the next few weeks.” Expand Expanding Close
In March we reported on a new jailbreak tweak called ProWidgets that introduced a whole suite of widgets to the iOS 7 Notification Center. With today’s release of iOS 8, Avanio Labs, the company created by Alan Yip, has released several native widgets for the new operating system. These new add-ons will help you keep track of your calendar and to-do list, monitor the weather, and perform a ton of useful actions on the text stored in your clipboard.
The first of these is Agenda+, which you can see in the screenshots above. Agenda+ combines a list view of your calendar events with a summary of your iOS Reminders. iOS typically breaks these two up into separate widgets, with the Calendar widget showing a full timeline of your day (which can take up a lot of space depending on how many events you have and how late in the day they are).
Earlier today Apple announced the next version of its iOS software, iOS 8, during the WWDC keynote today. Below you’ll find a gallery of all the new bells and whistles in the latest operating system. If you’ve got some screenshots you’d like to send us, you can send them to tips@9to5mac.com.
Sync.ME, a third-party contacts app for iOS with over 8 million downloads, just rolled out an interesting feature that brings new functionality to Apple’s own Contacts app on iOS. As pictured above, the latest version of the Sync.ME app now adds a “Widgets” link within Apple’s Contacts app that provides quick access to social network profiles for contacts and a number of other handy functions for quickly sharing content.
They are called ‘Widgets’, but in reality they are essentially quick links to profiles on social networks and other functions of the Sync.ME app. The interesting aspect is the fact that you’ll no longer have to launch the Sync.ME app and can now access all of the “Widgets” functionality from directly within the native iOS Contacts app.
On top of links to the contact’s Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn profiles, you’ll also find the ability to place and record calls over VoIP, quickly capture a business card using your camera, jot down a note, or add a reminder to your calendar for a specific contact. Other widgets will allow you to quickly share your location or a photo over iMessage or SMS, as well as post customized greeting cards directly to a contact’s timeline.
To accomplish this, the app appears to use the AddressBook API’s in a novel way that allows the app to automatically add a URL into a custom field for contact cards. That URL opens the “Widgets” section for any particular contact within Sync.ME, but the entire experience feels rather seamless. Here’s how to set it up: Expand Expanding Close
We’ve seen lots of iOS 7 concepts popping up lately thanks to all the rumors that Jony Ive’s new role on the software side of things could mean major changes for the next major iOS update. Many of the concepts borrow from features already available to jailbreak users, and there seems to be a big focus on widgets and lock screen enhancements. We’re not too sure that iOS 7 will get the full Ive treatment like some are expecting, but this latest iOS concept from designer F. Bianco certainly gives us a taste of the possibilities. Rather than just focusing on one area of iOS, Bianco presents a number of concepts for widgets, app switching, media controls, and much more. Go past the break for screenshots:
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