Posts in reviews

Grocery Brings Lists, Recipe Steps, and Timers to Your Home Screen and Is Right at Home on the iPad with a Three-Column Layout

Grocery has come a long way from its origins as a simple list-building app for the iPhone. The app has evolved to include a terrific Watch app, an iPad app, and support for meal planning, recipes, and inventory tracking. Whether you only use Grocery’s core list-based features or its more advanced features, today’s addition of widgets and a new iPad design enhance the experience of using the app for everyone.

I’ve covered Grocery in depth before, so I won’t retread that ground here, except to encourage readers who haven’t looked at Grocery in a while to try it out. At its core, the app is all about building intelligent grocery lists. No other grocery app I’ve used makes it as easy to add and manage lists as Grocery, through a combination of smart design and dynamic sorting which is based on the order you check items off as you shop. On top of that, the app includes meal planning, recipes, inventory management, and list sharing, extending its usefulness well beyond the grocery store.

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Fantastical Debuts Powerful, Versatile Widgets Alongside Scribble for iPad

Time itself has been under attack in this year of infamy. In some ways 2020 has felt like an eternity, but somehow, simultaneously, it’s shocking that we’re nearing the end of it. Our days have lost so much of the structure and the rhythms we’re used to, resulting for some people in days that are long and void of much activity, while others are overwhelmed in a different way as they juggle work with caring for their children, facilitating virtual school, and of course hopping on too many Zoom calls per day. Whatever your situation may be, your concept of time has likely been thrown off-kilter this year.

Yet time marches on. And for many of us, the assaults on our normal patterns of life have required building new patterns, new structures for our weeks and days so we can find a new sense of normal. Rather than abandon our calendars, we perhaps need to be more judicious with them than ever. Which is where Fantastical with its new iOS 14 widgets and Scribble support comes in.

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Weather Line Offers Personalization through Beautiful Themed Weather Widgets

One thing has proven clear since iOS 14 released last week: every app has its own unique take on widgets. Among all the new widgets we’ve covered, there really isn’t a common theme that can be drawn. Perhaps over time certain best practices will emerge, but right now apps are all doing their own thing, including weather apps. Last week we reviewed a weather app that offered fine-grained control of all the different data types contained in its widgets; today I want to cover an app that takes an entirely different approach to personalization.

Weather Line doesn’t provide any options to choose which data a widget will display. You get the data it gives you: nothing more, nothing less. However, the app has gone all-out with personalization in an entirely different way: widget themes.

Weather Line’s widgets display the same beautiful visuals found inside the full app, with charts mapping either an hourly forecast spanning the next 10 hours or a daily forecast covering the next 10 days. The hourly widget is available in small, medium, and large sizes, while the daily flavor is limited to medium and large, making a total of five widget options.

Once you’ve selected the widget(s) you’d like on your Home Screen or in your Today view, it’s time to personalize them with one of Weather Line’s themes. By tapping on an installed widget while in jiggle mode, or by long-pressing a widget and choosing ‘Edit Widget’ from the menu, you can open the widget configuration screen. There are only two options to configure: location for the widget’s weather data, and your preference of widget theme.

There are a total of 20 theme options to choose from, offering a diverse array of looks for matching your Home Screen setup. These include 18 different color themes ranging from Milennial Pink to Neon, Dracula, or Emoji, plus there are two additional options you can choose instead of specifying one of these 18 themes: Dynamic Background and Match System Appearance.

Widgets that offer extensive settings to fiddle with are great, especially for power users. But there’s something special and perhaps even more broadly appealing about being able to personalize a hyper-aesthetic Home Screen, and for that, Weather Line is an excellent choice.

Drafts 22 Review: Widgets, Scribble, and More

One of my favorite times every year is right around the beginning of August. Not because of the weather – summer where I live – but rather it’s when beta season is in full swing. Apps are putting polish on features, the full update scope is set, and everything starts to feel stable. And there’s nothing better to me than a new Drafts update to coincide with new OS features, bringing new uses of the app to my répertoire.

With the release of iOS and iPadOS 14 this year, it might seem on the surface that the updates to most apps are minimal. Widgets are the hot new feature of the operating systems, along with the visual changes of macOS Big Sur. While most apps will benefit from these changes, the productivity category will be greatly helped. And like Shortcuts, Scriptable, and others, Drafts benefits greatly from these new changes. It might take you a bit of time to see how this will fit your use cases, but once you give that some thought, it will open up new opportunities for you to use the app.

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Widgets and a New Sidebar Design Make Anybuffer a Standout Among Clipboard Managers

I use clipboard manager apps in a couple of different ways on my iPhone and iPad. The first way is as long-term storage. I stash documents, snippets of text, and URLs that I need to send to people over and over, which is easier than digging around in the Files app or Dropbox.

Second, I use clipboard managers as a short-term holding pen for all sorts of information. Sometimes I’m combining an image, some text, and a URL from different apps. Other times, I find something I want to send to someone later, and I don’t want to lose track of it. Lately, I’ve been using Anybuffer for both situations. The app has been great, but with the latest version that supports widgets and the new iPad sidebar design, Anybuffer has taken a significant leap forward.

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Soor Offers Beautiful, Customizable Widgets for Apple Music

The formula is tried and true: Apple makes quality software that nonetheless leaves a lot of room for third-party developers to build something more powerful and better tailored for specific needs. In iOS 14, the built-in Music widget is a great example of this. I really like Music’s widget, which shows your recently played albums and playlists so you can quickly get some music going; it offers valuable utility. But if I’m frank, there’s a whole lot more that could have been done with widgets for Music.

That’s where Soor comes in. The third-party client for Apple Music that I recently covered offers not one, not two, but three different widgets to satisfy your music needs. And within those three widgets there’s a lot of customization to help account for a wide assortment of user preferences and desires. Every widget is powerful and also just as beautiful as what Apple’s team built, matching the full Soor app’s identity as a whole.

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Wikipedia’s Widgets Bring Daily Updates to Your iOS 14 Home Screen

My iPad and iPhone are both important devices in my life, but they serve different roles for me. I use the iPad Pro as a work machine, while my iPhone is set up more for recreation and on-the-go uses. As a result, my approach with widgets has largely differed on each device. One widget I happily keep installed on both, however, is Apple’s Photos widget. I love the surprise and delight element of having the widget update automatically throughout the day, displaying photos I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

This sort of passive, but welcome information delivery is at the heart of three separate widgets included in the latest Wikipedia app update:

  • Picture of the day
  • On this day
  • Top read

The purpose of each widget is pretty self-explanatory: one shows a different beautiful photo each day, another tells you about something that happened on this day in the past, and another shows today’s popular Wikipedia pages.

Widgets that surface data from one of the largest public information hubs in the world seems like a no-brainer use case, and the Wikipedia app has done a great job here.

Each widget is available in small, medium, and large sizes, showing more or less information as they’re able. I find the small size a great choice for the picture of the day, though the large is nice too because it includes a caption to accompany the photo. With ‘On this day’ and ‘Top read’ the medium size strikes a great balance of providing just the right amount of information. And if you ever want to learn more, you can always tap on the widget to jump straight to the content you’re interested in.

Widgets have so many different use cases, but this delivery of information I’d never otherwise see is one of my favorites. Wikipedia is a perfect example of how to do it right, and I’m eager to continue exploring this concept as I build out my ideal iOS and iPadOS 14 Home screens.

Things Introduces New Widgets and Scribble for Task Creation on iPad

I’ve used Things off and on as my primary task manager for as long as I’ve used Apple devices, which is just over a decade now. During that time the app has been remarkably consistent at supporting new OS features as soon as Apple launches them, and this year is no exception. In its latest update, Things has added new widgets for iOS and iPadOS 14 as well as a unique implementation of Scribble for creating new tasks. Apple Watch users will find a couple useful new complication options too.

On the surface, the update may seem simple and straightforward: new widgets, Scribble support, and new complications. But as the team at Cultured Code has done time and time again, their implementation of new OS technologies is thoughtful and even innovative, especially on iPad.

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