Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m just glad you’ve decided to watch this video with me.
Today, we’re going to take a look at a feature that’s built into iOS 8 and it’s one that
I probably should’ve been a little bit more aware of before but the bottom line was I
didn’t really pay much attention to iOS 8 until I got my big new iPhone 6+, which
I still am quite enjoying having.
So today, we’re going to be talking about instant notification stuff on iOS 8 through
the use of widgets.
Yes indeed, Android users aren’t the only people with widgets.
iOS has widgets not quite as accessible as in the Android world, but widgets are widgets
today on Dotto Tech.
Yes indeed, all us poor iOS users who have not had access to widgets in the past now
have access to widgets on our iPhone as long as we’re using the latest operating system,
iOS 8 or above, if there is an above when you watch this video.
Now widgets are a really cool idea.
They are basically almost like applets.
If apps are junior versions of applications then widgets are junior versions of apps,
they’re one farther down the totem pole.
But they are kind of always running in the background and instant access to the core
information that an app is delivering to you.
We’ve had them for a while in the android world.
For example, when I’m using my Android phone, I love the Evernote which gives me instant
access to create new notes and things like that.
I am now starting to play with widgets in my iPhone.
Now Apple decided in their wisdom not to make widgets available on the home screen.
So when you look at your main screen of your iOS device, it is not going to have widgets
on it.
You get to your widgets by swiping down into the Notifications area, and for reasons known
only to Apple, they’ve decided to put all of the widgets under the Today tab in Notifications.
If you go into the Notifications side, that’s just notifications.
It’s in the Today side and how you actually access them is here by tapping on the Edit.
There doesn’t seem to be another quick and easy way.
I looked in the Settings and it didn’t look to me like there’s an easy way to get to
it.
Perhaps there is an easy way and you guys can mention it in the chat area below but
for the most part, you have to go in through the actual screens that you’re going to
be working with.
Now this is now my widgets in my Today part of Notifications.
You can see that I actually haven’t configured it very much.
I’ve got reminders in the calendar which I believe defaults but down below it’s got
a list of all of the apps that are installed on my iPhone that are widget-friendly or WF.
So widget-friendly apps include things like Sunrise Calendar which I want to include.
So I hit the plus key and you see Sunrise Calendar has now moved up.
See, I don’t want the regular iOS calendar because I use Sunrise which combines all of
my different calendars together so I’m putting that there.
I don’t use the Apple’s Reminders but instead I use Todoist as my main task manager.
So as you can see, I can go through and you can add the appropriate widgets to your own
notifications center.
So now that I’ve done that, I will be getting notifications from those apps.
Now what are the best widgets?
This is going to be a trial and error thing.
You’re going to have to go through, add widgets that you want to use.
There I see within my widgets—oh good it’s got my to-do list available to me.
Look, I’m looking at it right away on Todoist so there I can say I already did that so there
it was four days ago, I did it I guess.
But there, you can check things off right then and it’s got your tasks so they’re
going to be instantly accessible to you.
Of course, the place that they’re accessible to you is going to be when you swipe down
into your Notifications center and there are all of the Todoist tasks and the Sunrise tasks.
If we go back in, just one last thing, is you can edit the order that they appear, the
priority that they appear, top to bottom in the list by just clicking and sliding them
thusly within the manager.
I think this is, as I say, a trial and error thing.
You’re going to have to try out your own widgets and see which ones work best for you.
I’ll be experimenting with all the new apps as I go along.
I’ll be seeing which one of them I might want regular access to in the widgets so it’s
good.
So finally, we are now a widget-friendly OS, those of us in the iOS world.
We join our Android brethren in the world of widgets.
That’s it.
I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
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That is it for today.
I am Steve Dotto, still grateful that you stayed with me to the end.
Till next time, have fun storming the castle.