Are you awidgetsuser? If you aren’t, you almost definitely should be. Widgets are tiles of glanceable information onAndroid,watchOS,macOS,iPadOS, and, for the purposes of this piece,iOS. Widgets are placeable in a 2x2, 2x4, or 4x4 app size tile on your iPhone’s Home Screen among your apps or on the Today View page by swiping left to right. Frankly, I believe the value of glanceable information is horribly underrated, so I’m here to share six widgets that continue to personally make every day better for me.
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1CARROT Weather
See what the weather feels like
CARROT Weather
Apple has a fantastic weather app with some equally handy widgets available on every iPhone by default. Still, there’s one critical feature that I want from my weather widget: to show what the temperature feels like. As asubscription, CARROT Weather offers several great features, such as Next-Hour Radar mapping, the ability to select your weather data course, and sassy weather-related commentary.
But it also offers the option to toggle Show Feels Like for its widgets – a feature I happily continue paying for as wind and other environmental factors can substantially impact how the temperature feels where I live. CARROT Weather continues to iterate on its widgets currently providing a variety of sizes and settings, along with being interactive to show additional information with a single tap.
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2Empty Fasting
A privacy-focused intermittent fasting app
Empty Fasting
As part of my health and wellness journey, I got back into intermittent fasting. The single most frustrating part of fasting is finding an app that respects your privacy and doesn’t provide a free app only to collect and sell your data. Could I not use an app? Sure, but I want to use one. Fortunately, I finally found Empty Fasting, a one-time purchase app with no fancy features. It’s a simple countdown and fast tracker app with widget support! Adding Empty to the Home Screen as a widget lets you monitor your fast’s countdown throughout the day.
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Tracking my activity all day long
Fitness is Apple’s physical activity tracker app famous for its three rings: red for activity, green for exercise minutes, and blue for standing hours. I give theApple Watch, the Fitness app, andApple Fitness+huge attributions for helping me lose weight and be healthier every day. The Fitness app’s widget lives on my Home Screen, Lock Screen, and Apple Watch face to keep me apprised of my daily progress towards my three activity rings. Monitoring my rings throughout the day motivates me to close them daily and complete the monthly activity challenges.
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4WhatsMyAgeAgain
Never forget the age of someone again
WhatsMyAgeAgain
I know I’m not alone in having trouble remembering the age of people or pets. Fortunately, there’s a free app called WhatsMyAgeAgain, which has the sole purpose of creating widgets showing your age and that of others. There are two widget types: What’s My Age and What’s Their Age. Both are available in all three widget sizes. Upon adding a What’s My Age widget, you add your date of birth. Similarly, by adding a What’s Their Age widget, you add their date of birth and name. I’ve found WhatsMyAgeAgain incredibly helpful for remembering the age of my partner, parents, and dogs.
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Passively tracking the market
The Apple Stocks app is the victim of endless memes. For the longest time, I was one of those people mocking the purpose of a default stocks app. Granted, great alternative stock market monitoring apps like Yahoo Finance – Stock Market offer custom price alert notifications. However, as someone who appreciates Apple UI choices and only wants to passively monitor his investments, I find the default Stocks app as a widget great. I rarely ever launch Stocks, but I frequently causally check my investment’s performance by switching over to the Today View while being out of sight, out of mind, most of the time.
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6Shortcuts
So many automation tiles
Recently, I’ve become a significant user of Apple’s Shortcuts app tocreate automationsstreamlining my repetitive workflows. If you also use Shortcuts frequently, you can add them to your iPhone’s Home Screen and Today View to quickly action the automation. Personally, I have a Smart Stack of two pages of eight Shortcuts each on my iPhone. On one page, I place Shortcuts to action mostly HomeKit routines, while on the second page, I have automations tocontrol my Tesla.
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