Com let’s. Take a look at some tips for using widgets on your iphone in ios 14.. Music macmost is brought to you. Thanks to a great group of more than 750 supporters, go to macmost.com patreon there. You can read more about the patreon campaign, join us and get exclusive content, and course discounts. So widgets is a great new feature of ios 14 that allows you to add more information and functionality to your home screen pages. First, let me show you the basics. If you want to add a widget to a home screen, go to that home, screen, tap and hold in a blank area, and then you enter editing mode, then tap the plus button at the top, and now you can add a widget you’ll see a variety of Different widgets that you can add, and if you go all the way to the bottom, you actually see them listed by app. So then you can pick an app like, say the clock app. Then you could flip through a variety of different widgets that you can add and then tap the add widget button. This adds the widget here to the home screen in addition to adding it there, if you exit, editing mode but then tap and hold the widget, you usually get an option to edit the widget, and this allows you to specify things. For instance, here this widget was four clocks and i can tap any one of these and set a new location for it.
So the first tip i want to show you is that you can use widgets on the home screen, but also on the widget screen. The widget screen was around before ios 14. it’s. What you see when you’re on the first home screen page and you swipe left to right – you go to the widget screen here. You’Ve got widgets here and you also have widgets here on your home screen. You can move them back and forth between those, so i can tap and hold on this widget and then i can select edit home screen and now i can drag this widget over to the widget screen here and i could leave it there. I could also tap and drag a widget from here and move it back to the home screen. Now, when you go to add a widget, a special type of widget, you can add, is called a smart stack. You’Ll probably see it here at the top, but you can also scroll down to the list and then tap smart stack there and you can choose from the three different sizes here. Let’S choose this side and add a smart stack, so smart stack has various different pages. You can see here the dots on the right side, so in regular mode here i can flip through the different items in the smart stack. If i tap and hold the widget, i have the ability to edit the stack – and this shows me a list of items here now.
The first item is smart rotate. What that will do is your iphone will try to determine which one to show you at any. Given time it’ll look at the time of day and your behavior and some other things to figure that out, if you’d rather have it just stay on the last widget shown just turn off. Smart rotate and it’ll stay there until you change the widget. Now one of the type of widgets you can have in here that i’ve got is one called siri suggestions and you can see here. If i go in and edit the stack it shows me, siri suggestions is the first one. This will show you various different actions that your iphone thinks you want to do right now, but if it doesn’t get it right, you can always tap and hold any of those actions and there’ll be a suggest less item, so i can tell it yeah. I usually don’t want to see the weather, so let’s suggest that less and show me some other suggestion. Instead, now in a smart stack, you can go in and edit it and you can set the order for things. So i can make siri suggestions go down in the list. I can bring news up under weather and i can set exactly what order i want these to be in. I can also remove items by simply swiping right to left and i’ll get a delete for any of those items, so i can delete siri suggestions from the smart stack and maybe also photos now adding to the smart stack is a little trickier.
What you need to do to do, that is add a new widget to the home screen, so let’s go into widgets here and let’s say i want to add a clock widget, so i’ll select clocks. Here i want to make sure i choose a widget that’s. The same size as the stack so it’s going to be this size here, i’ll add the widget. So now you can see i’ve got both widgets there. This is just a widget by itself. This is a stack. Let me drag this widget into the stack and now i’ve added it there. Now let me exit editing mode, tap and hold this widget, and i can edit the stack and i can see clocks have been added in there and i could set its position. This can allow you to do some interesting things. For instance, you can add the same widget over and over again to a stack as an example. Let’S do that for a stack that’s, just all stock quotes so i’ll go into edit mode here. I’Ll use the plus button and i’ll look for stocks, i’ll go into there and let me go over and there is a special symbol widget, where i can have a single symbol. So let’s add that widget here now you can see i’ve got a widget for a single symbol. Now let’s go and add another one, the same thing again so i’ll go in here: i’ll go over to symbol and i’ll.
Add this widget. So i have two widgets. Like this, i could drag one on top of the other and now i’ve added them and created a stack, let’s go and add a third one and i’ll use the same symbol. Widget and i’ll drag that one into the stack. So now i’ve got three pages in that stack. I could flip through these they’re all going to show me the dow jones, but if i tap and hold one of them, i can edit the symbol and change it to something else. Let’S select apple for this one, then i can go to the next one and let’s tap and hold, and edit that one and set the symbol there to another stock and then let’s go to the third one and let’s manually enter in a stock symbol. Here and now, i’ve got this little stack here that allows me to flip. Through some stocks you could do the same thing with a set of clock, widgets or maybe weather with different locations for each widget inside the stack. Now, if you like using widgets, what you’re going to want to do is go to the app store and search for widgets and you’re going to come up with a lot of different apps that are widget makers. You can go in and make special widgets, usually with things like information or the weather, the date time bits of things like that, there’s a whole bunch of different ones to choose from so you can pick one that looks good to you and now you have a Whole bunch more widgets that you can add to your home screens and into the stacks, but also some regular apps, may have widgets as well as an example.
The wikipedia app which is free adds widgets let’s, go and try to add a wikipedia widget here. Let’S add a new widget and you can see it’s even suggesting it here at the top, or i could scroll all the way down at the bottom, and you can see it here in the list of apps and there’s. A variety of different widgets here i’ve got three different sizes for picture of the day. I’Ve got on this day. Widgets and i’ve got top read widgets, so i can select one of those let’s do the very first one here for a little picture. Add that widget here and now i get a picture of the day widget. It just looks nice on my home screen. But if i want more information, i can tap that and it will then take me to that picture in the wikipedia app. So if you have the shortcuts app and you like creating shortcuts, you can add a shortcuts. Widget that’s, really useful, so let’s go in add a new widget here and i’ll scroll down all the way to shortcuts and let’s add that and there’s a small widget that’s. Just going to activate a single shortcut, but you also can do a group of four or group of eight let’s. Add this one here and it’s going to add four different shortcuts here now, if i tap on any of those it’ll run that shortcut. But if i tap in the middle there and hold, i can edit the widget, and one of the things i can do is choose a folder.
So the shortcuts app now allows you to create a folder. So i can create a folder and i’ve done that i’ve created a folder called widget shortcuts and i’ve placed a bunch of different shortcuts in that folder in the shortcuts app it’s just an organizational feature. So you don’t have just one huge list of shortcuts, but you can then use that to choose a group of shortcuts. So now i have specific shortcuts that are going to appear here like one that will just start playing podcasts another one that will turn on. Do not disturb one that opens the camera app and another that sends a specific message to a person. Now i can just tap any one of these on my home screen and it will run that shortcut, so you can really not only customize the information you see on your home screen, but also actions that you can perform on your home screen using the shortcuts, widget And i can actually create like three different folders each with four shortcuts in them add three shortcut widgets to a single stack. Then i could flip through three pages, showing a total of 12 different shortcuts right here on my home screen that i could run just by tapping them now. One last tip you can use shortcuts to completely replace apps on your home screen. So my main home screen has a bunch of apps on it, but there’s nothing to stop me from adding all these shortcuts there, so i’ll tap and hold in a blank area and let’s drag this widget to the first page.
Let’S drag this one to the first page as well, this one to the first page, and finally, this one to the first page, and i can see my main home screen, actually has no apps on it, except the ones at the bottom, and it just has all These widgets, the second page, now has all of those app icons, but if i tap and hold and then tap down here, where i see the dots, i could turn off the second and third pages now. All i have is a single home page and all that has on it is widgets. So whenever i use the home button, i go to this screen, which has everything i need on it and if i swipe over because i’ve hid all those other home screens, it just takes me right to the app library. So i have a screen with my widgets on it and then the very next screen has all my apps in the app library. So if you found these tips for using widgets on your iphone useful, let me know what your favorite widget creation, apps and third party apps that now have widgets in them are in the comments below Music, i publish new tutorials.Nwh6qOTn8LM
