The
iOS notification centre already included widgets for weather and
calendar, but these were fairly limited. With the launch of iOS 8, the
notification centre gets a huge upgrade, as you can now control which
apps show up and what additional information can be presented using
widgets. This can range from a calendar to a translation widget to just
showing you your progress in different books.
There are a
lot to choose from and some are more useful than others. We used quite a
few of these widgets and here are our favourites.
Wdgts
Wdgts
is a great app to start with that really makes the most use of the
notification centre. This app has five basic functions - calculator,
currency converter, time zones, calendar and photo frame. It puts all of
these in your notification centre. Want to quickly check the current
exchange rate or make a quick calculation? You can access all these
functions at any time by just opening the notification centre.
iTranslate
This
widget lets you quickly translate text into English quickly - all you
need to do is copy the text wherever you encounter it, and iTranslate
will show you the English translation in the notification centre. So if
you come across a word in a webpage, email or book, you don't need to
copy and paste it into Safari, and then search for it. Simple use cases
like this are a great way of using the notification centre without
making it complicated.
Sky Guide
Sky Guide
(Rs. 150) is a great app for stargazing, more of which we have written
about earlier.
This app has a widget that shows you the time of the day (or night)
when celestial bodies will be visible. In the widget you can see these
times for the Sun, Moon (along with its phases), Venus, Mars, Jupiter
and Saturn. A neat graph to illustrate this is the icing on the cake.
Evernote
Evernote uses widgets to help
you speed up the note-taking process. It shows five buttons - text,
camera, photos, reminders and list. You can pick any one of these and
jump to typing notes in the Evernote app. This gets full marks for
boosting productivity, as you save time by quickly selecting the type of
note you want to create.
Yahoo Weather
The
beauty of Yahoo Weather lies in its design.
It is perhaps the best weather app on the App Store from a design
perspective. Yahoo Weather now has a widget that shows you the current
temperature and forecast in the widget, along with nice background
images that are a hallmark of the app. Our only complaint is that the
image doesn't fill the width of the screen, but hopefully it will be
fixed soon.
Best of the rest
We also liked widgets of many other apps, and here are the best of the rest.
- Audiobooks
from Audible: Tracks
total time spent listening to audiobooks. Version 2.2 of this app often
crashes on launch, so wait for a fix (v 2.2.1) before you download it.
- Parcel
is a nice app for tracking deliveries of shipments. Unfortunately, it
does not support courier services based in India yet.
- Day One
(Rs. 300): Tracks how many notes you have taken everyday and shows a them
in a notes versus time bar graph. Shows a few past entries and photos
too.
- TwoDots: This fun
puzzle game uses widgets to show game progress, lives remaining and
medals won.
- Dropbox: Shows most
recent files from your Dropbox folder. If you use a shared folder, you
can quickly open files added by others in the group.
Which iOS 8 widgets did you find like? Let us know via the comments.
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