Hacker News Reader

Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to see a situation where widgets are actually useful.

I find them useful. Here's how:

- Weather info. Before heading out for the day I can see instantly if I might need a jacket or umbrella later.

- Tube status. I can see at a glance if there are any problems on any underground lines. If there are, I can click on the problem line to get more detailed information with a single touch.

- Calendar. Shows me my schedule for the day.

- Music. Control playback without having to launch an app.

I also have widgets I tend to only use when I'm travelling, showing currency and timezone information.

Weather and Calender you can check from notification center and Music from control center. It's just a swipe down or a swipe up. If there are any problems on the subway, you get a push notification. You find all your notification in notification center, also your last messages and so on.

The difference is that you don't need to swipe down to see them. You just look at your phone and the information you want is there.

Sure, and the lockscreen is another place to put information like this.

> It's just a swipe down or a swipe up.

That's why I prefer a widget (or lockscreen), there's no swiping required at all. As for getting push notifications for the subway... No thanks, I don't want a notification every time some subway line is running a little slow. I only want notifications for events I care about, with few or no false-positives.

To have those push notifications work properly, you would need something like Google Now. You don't want notifications for the nearest tube station, you only want those for the stations you use on a regular basis. So Apple would have to know your daily routine for this to work properly. Apple is not keen on tracking copious amounts of its users data, so they may be opposed to this from the beginning. Then they have to have a web service to properly handle all of this. Poor web services is the biggest flaw of the Apple ecosystem.

When I used an Android device, I did not like widgets cluttering up my desktop. However, I did have a calendar widget on the lock screen. I am a forgetful person, so I appreciate having reminders about upcoming events so visible. I am forced to look at it. Even with with the red badge on Clear, I don't open the app enough to see what tasks I have to do. Opening and closing apps to get a small amount of useful information seems so inefficient to me.

Calendar in the notification center ain't no substitute. I'm looking at my iPhone right now.

Swipe down: the screen is full of today's date, the weather, a note telling me that it would take me about 4 minutes to drive somewhere (why? I'm not going anywhere today? And why is it telling me it'd take 4 minutes to drive to the local Urban Outfitters store? Oh wait that's also a bus stop I walk to a lot, GOOD JOB APPLE), and telling me the next thing up on my calendar. At the very bottom of the screen is an icon and the very top of my calendar.

And this calendar only shows me a couple things for today, because it insists on showing me the hour grid around them. In the future? It just says "It looks busy tomorrow. There are 7 events scheduled."

Back on the Android, I would have seen something like this floating on my home screen the moment I unlocked the thing:

Today: 9:00am refresh con signs 11:30am change patch! 6:30pm Jason's game night 8:59pm Sunset

Saturday: 5:13am Sunrise 9:00am Market day! 3:00pm Yoga 8:00pm Sunset

Sunday: 5:13am Sunrise 5:45pm Intermediate pole

etc, etc, etc. There's my next few days, constantly there for me to glance at and have a chance to think "oh I have this thing coming up, I should prepare for it today". Doesn't tell me how long an event is but that's not a thing I actually care about most of the time.

How is that useful? To glance at that information you have to:

1. Unlock your phone

2. Press home to go to the homescreen

3. Swipe to the screen that contains the widget

4. Possibly scroll the widget itself

Android itself has several better alternatives for such glanceable information that are quicker to access:

- Google Now / other search plugin

- Lock screen widgets / lock screen "now playing" info

- Lock screen app quick links (available using Play Store lock screens or some vendor software)

- Persistent notifications in the notification bar

- The recent apps menu (to actually go to the app you want!)

Don't get me wrong, I love Android. I've used it for the last 5 years. It's just that I've never understood why people use widgets. They're too clunky to be useful even for the most basic of things.

I guess that's the beauty of Android, you can use the phone whichever way you think is best. This particular feature is not something that Apple should be envious of however. It really isn't universally popular or considered useful on Android. Windows Phone's live tiles are much better, but wouldn't work on Apple home screens either, because you would still have to fiddle about swiping through your home screens.

> Don't get me wrong, I love Android. I've used it for the last 5 years. It's just that I've never understood why people use widgets. They're too clunky to be useful even for the most basic of things.

I use widgets consistently on my phone. My to-do list, calendar, notes, and weather are all shown as widgets to the left and right screens of my primary homescreen. I don't necessarily have these apps running in app history all the time, so it is much easier to do 1 tap on the home button for the home screen followed by a left or right swipe to view the content I'm after.

They also are really useful if the app you have a widget for is slow to load or you have a slower device. Since you can view the partial information faster than loading the entire app, you can avoid the delay in getting information.

If you have your most important widget(s) on your homescreen along with your most useful apps, you're probably doing 1-3 anyway most times you use your phone.

For me, it's very similar to the badges on iOS (which is something I miss when I use my Android work phone). I'm often not actively looking for the info, but it's a nice little prompt about it being there.

As for your alternatives

- Google Now is (at least for me) only useful when it's displayed as a widget

- the lock screen is fine for some things but less good for sensitive stuff - and with the fingerprint scanner on the 5S I rarely see my iPhone's lock screen these days

-persistent notifications on the notification bar quickly get cluttered and tell you nothing more than there is a notification of some description for that app

- the recent app menu still involves you going to a separate screen

Clearly they work for you, but also clearly they don't work as well for many others.

>Music. Control playback without having to launch an app.

Well I don't really think that's a good use. iOS has the music controls on the lock screen

So does Android. Of course, when you are using the phone, you aren't always at the lock screen. iOS has the swipe-up on the homescreen to get music controls, which, while its a different access method than widgets, is a clear indication that someone at Apple thinks that something besides "lock screen" and "launch the app" is useful.

Widgets are a more general solution, and suit the fact that users have different things that they want that kind of quick access to.

>- Weather info. Before heading out for the day I can see instantly if I might need a jacket or umbrella later.

Yes, otherwise it takes all 2 secs to do that.

So where you live, the weather never changes during the day?

I don't use weather widgets, but "looking outside" is hardly an effective way of seeing if you need an umbrella, especially now in the Spring.

>So where you live, the weather never changes during the day?

No, I mean it takes all 2 seconds to open the weather app and check.

On iOS you can do 3 out of the 4 without even unlocking the phone.

For weather and calendar, swipe down from the top to show the notification center.

For music control, swipe up from the bottom to show control center.

Tube status... sorry, you'll need to open an app.

Tube Status: Push notification or Text/SMS alerts (http://alerts.tfl.gov.uk/)

I constantly miss having my upcoming calendar items floating there on most of my home screen. It was a quiet little ambient reminder of things coming up in my life every time I took my Android phone out and poked at it.

I like nearly every other aspect of the iOS experience more than my old Nexus One, but this keeps on bugging me.

I wrote a real-time transit app for my city and the second-most requested feature is a widget for a favorite stop that will display ETA automatically. As a frequent bus rider myself, I would make a lot of use out of something like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com