Os x widgets gone full#
Os x widgets gone mac#

The Home Screen has always been hard to manage. Some of these changes stay true to Apple’s mission, but some of the recent improvements only highlight structural problems that have remained with the iPhone since the beginning. With iOS 14, the iPhone is growing up in a big way. Or you can swipe right and see the column page of just widgets, with the search bar at the top. Or you can swipe down from the Home Screen to search for apps and content directly. One swipe too many past the Home Screen takes you to the new App Library page. Whether you decide to add the new widgets or not, the possibilities for the iPhone Home Screen have become much more complicated. Right now there are 17 different Apple apps offering widget features, including Siri shortcuts that let you create more complex shortcut actions. Widgets will tell you time, and predict the weather, and show you photos, and play your music. Among the apps, tucked neatly into the unchanged 6-by-4 grid, will be widget boxes of various sizes. This is a major new set of functionality-it deserves a name that fits. Sure, in iOS 7 the names made sense-but with Yosemite (and iOS 8) they just don’t fit anymore. My only real complaint is the name on the package: Notification Center is no longer just for notifications, and the Today view is the landing place for widgets with information that goes far beyond what’s happening today. Apple’s thriving community of app developers should provide us with a vibrant selection of widgets, something Dashboard never really achieved-or at least hasn’t seen since the halcyon days of 2006.Īll told, Notification Center’s Today view seems like a great replacement for Dashboard, and a major benefit to OS X users. Since iOS 8 also supports Notification Center widgets, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of the same widgets on both platforms. If they seem a little like fragments of iOS apps, you’re not far off.

Os x widgets gone mac#

Dashboard widgets (written in HTML and JavaScript) were introduced by Apple during an era where using Web-based technologies to write lightweight applets seemed like a great idea.īut now we’re in the App Store era, and using the same technologies that power iOS and Mac apps seems like a far better choice-and that’s what you’ll find running Yosemite’s Notification Center widgets. I’d put down good money that it will be removed in next year’s OS X update. You can enable or disable it via the Mission Control pane in System Preferences.īut let’s not kid ourselves: Dashboard’s on its last legs. Perhaps surprisingly, Dashboard still exists. When Apple announced the changes to Notification Center in Yosemite, everybody seemed to have the same thought: That pretty much wraps it up for Dashboard, the interface layer for simple widgets that Apple introduced nine years ago as a part of OS X Tiger. If you click in the Calculator widget, you can click on its buttons or use the keyboard to do your math. Clicking on a city in the Weather widget will expand it to show an hour-by-hour forecast, which is very much the behavior we’re used to seeing in Apple’s Weather app on iOS. Though many widgets are there just to be glanced at, you can interact with most of them, too. Click this, and you can modify that widget-adding or removing cities from the Weather or World Clock widgets, for example. When you’re not in Edit mode and you move your cursor over some of the widgets’ title bars, a lowercase letter i in a circle appears. When you edit the Today screen widgets, a second column slides out showing all currently unused widgets. And Stocks shows time-delayed stock prices. Calendar displays today’s calendar items. World Clock shows the time in various cities. Social lets you post to Facebook or Twitter, or send text via Messages. Calculator lets you do addition and multiplication and other basic mathy things. Reminders shows you timely items from the Reminders app. Weather displays current temperatures and forecasts.

These items are Notification Center Widgets, just like the ones introduced in iOS 8.Īpple provides nine basic widgets: Today summarizes what’s happening today in your schedule, as it does on iOS, and Tomorrow does likewise for the next day. You can also use this view to remove items that are currently in the Today view or re-order them.

Os x widgets gone full#

At the very bottom of the Today view is an Edit button when you click on it Notification Center slides out even further, adding a second column on the right that’s full of items you can add to the Today view.