Widgets in iOS and iPadOS 14 are here and can be saved to your iPhone or iPad Home screen. A lot of third-party app updates will be trickling out in the days and weeks ahead with support for their own custom widgets, vying for your limited Home screen space.
If you’re interested in expanding your vocabulary, a word of the day widget seems like a perfect fit for the Home screen where you can glance at it throughout the day. That’s exactly what LookUp 7 provides, alongside widgets for running quizzes and opening your word collections. The dictionary app has also upgraded its watchOS component in a big way, offering new functionality that was previously limited to the full iOS version.
Since its debut years ago, one of LookUp’s core functionalities has been a word of the day feature, which has always included beautiful graphics accompanying each word. These graphics, it turns out, make excellent additions to the Home screen. They look great while offering the chance to learn new words without requiring the manual step of opening the full LookUp app every day. The small widget’s graphic includes just the word, while the large option also displays its definition.
While the Word of the Day widget is easily my favorite option here, LookUp also offers Quizzes and Collections widgets. The latter simply provides a quick launcher for reopening some of your saved word collections, while the Quizzes option is nice for the amount of information it provides: you can see your average score for previous quizzes you’ve taken, track your progress over time, view any awards you’ve won, and quickly start a quiz with a single tap. In addition to their utility, it’s worth mentioning too that all of LookUp’s widgets are beautifully designed, an important detail if you’re going to add them to your Home screen.
LookUp’s new watchOS 7 app is the other highlight of today’s release. LookUp’s Watch app was already solid, but before now it was pretty limited in what it could do, only showing the word of the day and offering a search function to find a word’s definition. Now, however, all the core functionality found in the full iOS, iPadOS, and macOS app is available right on your wrist. That means your liked words and other saved collections are accessible on the Watch, and you can even run quizzes that are tailored for quicker interactions, such as by answering true or false questions about words. Keeping with the theme of enabling even more functionality on the Watch, two of LookUp’s Shortcuts actions – LookUp Words and Word of the Day – can be run directly from watchOS 7’s new Shortcuts app.
A great watchOS addition that isn’t even available on LookUp’s other platforms is the new Daily Quiz, which appears directly in the app’s main view. Right underneath the word of the day, the Daily Quiz provides a quick single-question quiz that you can answer with one tap, offering an extremely quick interaction perfectly suited for the wrist.
LookUp is always on top of the latest OS features, and this year is no different. The app offers some of the best looking widgets I’ve seen on iOS and iPadOS 14, and I’m glad that its watchOS 7 app brings the full LookUp experience to the wrist with speed and the fun new Daily Quiz. If you’re in need of a dictionary app, or simply some new widgets to occupy your Home screens, be sure to check out LookUp.
LookUp 7 is now available on the App Store, and you can read my previous coverage of the app here.
