{"id":35010,"date":"2022-02-12T19:48:46","date_gmt":"2022-02-13T00:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=35010"},"modified":"2022-02-16T13:45:31","modified_gmt":"2022-02-16T18:45:31","slug":"improving-macos-widgets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/12\/improving-macos-widgets\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving macOS Widgets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Hackett<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Apple killed off Dashboard at exactly the wrong time. Just one year after Catalina killed Dashboard, Apple started allowing developers to bring their iOS widgets over to the Mac in macOS Big Sur. Sadly, they all got stuffed into the slide-out Notification Center user interface[…]<\/p>\n

Notification Center is a real mess. Even on a Pro Display XDR, you get three visible notifications. That’s it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

They’re narrow, too.<\/p>\n

I was not a heavy user of Dashboard, but I miss it because the new iOS-style widgets are a huge regression. They’re not interactive. They generally have fewer features or display less information than their iOS counterparts, despite having access to the Mac’s larger display. And they’re unreliable. My Mac frequently forgets all my widgets. I configure them all again. They persist for a few reboots, then sometime in the middle of the day they’ll spontaneously disappear again.<\/p>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Widgets need a permanent home in the Mac UI, not hidden off in a Notification Center nobody looks at anyway. Alternative would be massively improving Launchpad to work much more like SpringBoard, and allow you to set that in place of your desktop<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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But forcing them into Notification Center on MacOS is poorly considered. The Mac has bigger displays than any iPad, yet has less screen real estate for visible widgets than an iPhone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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At WWDC 2007, when Steve Jobs announced the “sweet solution” for iPhone apps, Dashcode was envisioned as a way to build those web apps<\/a>. The idea was that developers could take their existing Mac OS X widget and convert it to work as an iPhone web app. That, obviously, was not well-received, and an official SDK for native apps was launched the following year. Dashboard withered and died, but not before Dashcode bit the dust. Yet, it took until just a couple of years ago for widgets to once again be a multi-platform effort, now with SwiftUI and, as Hackett wrote, without interactivity. Curious.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

BasicAppleGuy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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When Mac OS X 10.7 launched in 2011, Dashboard stopped being an overlay and became a separate page accessed via a swipe gesture, hotkey, or the LaunchPad. By OS X 10.10, Dashboard was disabled by default, and in macOS 10.15, it was removed from the OS entirely.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Many factors contributed to the success of widgets in iOS 14. First, Widgets became more customizable and provided users with the content they care about. Second, Widgets became more prominent; rather than being relegated to the side panel, Widgets adorned a user's Home Screen however they liked (a 'however they liked' that remains strictly restrained by Apple as to the placement and size of said Widgets). And lastly, third-party apps flooded the App Store allowing for the creation of custom Widgets which furthered the degree of personalization available. This personalization for content, coupled with increased visibility and an enthusiastic developer base, propelled Widgets to popularity. With Dashboard on Mac OS X, Apple did little to promote or enhance the platform beyond its initial release, and widgets were slowly set adrift into a sea of forgotten features.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

JF Martin<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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This is what we get: a small, vertical, cramped band of widgets. The interface is complex, slow even of fast Macs. I don’t know why Apple is confining them in this small and constrained space, maybe for the sake of some sort of cohesive visual experience to Apple’s other hardware platforms<\/a>. This design is based on arbitrary rules that we, the users, cannot be related to anything as we have the big screen has a reference. I don’t think Apple had to create such an experience just to make it easy to select a widget and its size. I find it surprising that nobody thought of mocking up a better way of managing widgets in the modern era.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n