On the iPhone and iPad you can now activate the widgets that may surprise the most loyal Apple users, who have never had an Android smartphone. Widgets are interactive panels that show variable information, such as weather conditions or commands to add quick notes to a notebook. Some widgets on iPhone and iPad are already installed, but turned off by default. The widgets of iOS8 work, however, in a different way than Android : they cannot appear on the main screen which remains reserved for applications and app folders and they cannot be resized, enlarged or reduced.
Widgets appear in the notification center and can be accessed from any application by expanding the notifications.
To get new widgets on iPhone and iPad with iOS, simply install an app that includes the widget.
For example, the Evernote app has the widget to quickly add a new note while Yahoo Weather has the widget to see the weather conditions without opening the application. Other examples can be news apps, calendar and activity apps or applications to see the resources used by the phone and keep an eye on the use of the network and memory in real time.
To enable the widgets, open the notification center by pulling down with your finger from the top of the screen and touch the Edit button at the bottom of the screen of the Today section. A list of existing widgets will be displayed here: Today, Summary, traffic conditions, calendar, reminders, and stock market .
Below them, you will see the widgets of other applications that you have installed. Touch the + button next to a widget to enable it and by touching the handles on the right side of the screen they can be dragged down or up depending on your preference. Tapping the - button removes a widget from the list. Some widgets cannot be moved, but can always be removed if they are not of interest. For example, the Today widget always appears at the top in the Today section of the notification center. Widgets can be accessed at any time by pulling the notification bar down. Depending on the widget, you can press buttons to quickly access specific sections of an app.
To get started, you can install several other widgets together with the free wdgts app which includes calculator, currency converter, time zones, calendar and photo frame. Others will come in the future and the main apps will integrate more and more detailed widgets.
The best widgets for iPhone are provided by apps like:
- Yahoo Weather
- Chrome
- Dropbox
- iTranslate
- Evernote
To conclude the speech widget on iPhone and iPad it is worth understanding whether these consume more battery or not. The widgets in iOS update when the notification center expands and have no option to use the update in the background. So, for example, the Yahoo! Weather does not update every hour automatically, but only when it is displayed. The widgets have very little impact on the battery, unless they are many and you do not frequently access the control center, forcing it to update frequently.
