iOS

[Trom]

Had to share this ..

Listening to a well known radio personality / political talking head who's also a big time fan boy. He spent the first several minutes of his third hour talking about how cool the new iOS 14 is, because it has this new and totally cool thing called "widgets".

 

[lunatic59]

They must have just invented them.

 

[Hadron]

Believe it or not I've played with iOS widgets (I've an iPad from work as well as my own tablet). In fact they've had them for a while, but always on a separate page: the new thing with iOS is that you can put them on your homepages now (though iPadOS hasn't gained the same flexibility).

They are still rather limited: 3 sizes only (what we'd call 1x1, 2x2 and 2x4: some can be "expanded" vertically, but you can't have a permanent full-screen widget), and a lot fewer of them than in Android. And as yet the one cool feature, the "widget stack" (one widget which you can swipe vertically to swap through a set of different 2x4 widgets) seems only to support a limited set of Apple's own widgets, though maybe 3rd-party apps can be updated to work with it. So they've clearly not been a big focus of Apple or iOS app developers so far, though perhaps with the ability to add them to home screens that will begin to change? You can definitely tell that it's a relatively new addition for them though.

 

[jeffsolomail]

They are pretty smart looking... I think the style is far better than some of the options on our play store...

Having said that.. I managed to find apple clones lol