Category: Apps

A few years ago, I wrote about the now-dead Dashboard, which was was in macOS for a long, long time:

While not as flashy or important as Tiger’s keystone feature, Spotlight, Dashboard still enjoyed a big push from Jobs on stage.

A user could tap a keyboard shortcut or visit a hot corner and Dashboard would activate, dimming the screen and flying in widgets. Adding new ones could be done with a click of the mouse.

(My Titanium PowerBook’s GPU couldn’t render the water ripple effect that played when a new widget was added to Dashboard. However, college roommate’s aluminum PowerBook could do it without breaking a sweat. I was insanely jealous of him for about 72 hours after we both installed Tiger in our dorm room.)

Jobs pitched widgets as mini-apps that let you look up a quick bit of information without ruining your workflow or train of thought. They allowed for quick interactions. They were present when you needed them, and disappeared when you didn’t.

The original design of Dashboard was very of its time. Just soak this in for a minute:

The design of Dashboard got toned down over time, and eventually it wasn’t even enabled by default on clean macOS installations. Keyboards that once shipped with a dedicated Dashboard shortcut were slowly phased out. By the time Apple finally pulled the plug on Dashboard in macOS Catalina, most of the widgets that once graced this corner of the OS had died off. The party had packed up years earlier, leaving just a small percentage of users still relying on the feature.¹

Apple killed off Dashboard at exactly the wrong time. Just one year after Catalina killed Dashboard, Apple started allowing developers to bring their iOS widgets over to the Mac in macOS Big Sur. Sadly, they all got stuffed into the slide-out Notification Center user interface:

Notification Center is a real mess. Even on a Pro Display XDR, you get three visible notifications. That’s it. Anything older is hidden behind a button, regardless of how many widgets you may have in the lower section of the Notification Center column:

Apple needs to rethink this and let this new class of widgets² breathe, being able to use the entire screen like the widgets of yore could. Bringing back Dashboard is an obvious solution here, and I’d love to see it make a return.

Update: Steve Troughton-Smith tweeted this in reply to my post:

Widgets need a permanent home in the Mac UI, not hidden off in a Notification Center nobody looks at anyway. Alternative would be massively improving Launchpad to work much more like SpringBoard, and allow you to set that in place of your desktop.

I thought about the Launchpad angle for a while, and I can see how turning it into a more iPad-like experience would be neat. A single place to get info from your widgets and launch a few favorite apps would be better than what we have now.

However, I think Apple has backed off the idea of needing to turn the iPad and Mac into each other, at least from a user interface standpoint. If Launchpad were to be updated to support widgets, I think it would remain an overlay to the macOS interface, not become the new center of it.

My buddy (and Connected co-host) Federico has been featured in the Mac App Store:

Federico Viticci became a master of Shortcuts by playing the long game.

In 2009 he cofounded MacStories, one of the most popular and trusted sources of Apple news and reviews on the web. Along the way, his obsession with efficiency led the Rome-based writer and journalist to become an expert at using Shortcuts on iOS. “It’s all about removing friction from everyday tasks,” he says.

With the debut of macOS Monterey, Viticci is taking advantage of the Shortcuts app on Mac and enjoying the chance to use his talents in an entirely new arena. “My first reaction to Shortcuts on Mac, honestly, was ‘What an incredible opportunity,'” says Viticci.

I mean, just look at this guy. Couldn’t be happier for him.

If only Apple ran some sort of program to approve apps before they appeared on the store.

I’m generally a fan of the Memories feature of Apple Photos, especially the inclusion of the widget starting in iOS 14.

However, there are drawbacks. The biggest of which is that Photos can surface painful past moments.¹ An extreme example is the attack on the Capitol last year. Here’s Jim Newell at Slate:

What was it like being inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? Kind of a blur. My colleagues and I on the congressional beat first got word that a House office building was under lockdown. Then, a couple of minutes later, we heard that the Capitol itself was going into lockdown. On the way to what would become my hiding spot, I watched as some rioters tried to smash their way through the front door on the east side of the Capitol. It was time to get behind a heavy door and keep my mouth shut.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those moments, trying to piece them all together as the one-year anniversary of the day approaches. But in going through my photos to stitch the memories into something coherent, I found that I didn’t need to. The Apple Photos app had taken the initiative and done so itself, automatically creating a cute Memories video from my pictures that day.

This story is horrifying, and I think it showcases my two big problems with this feature:

First, Apple does not give users enough control over what photos are featured. I would imagine that Newell would want to tell the system that he doesn’t want to see photos from January 6 in a Memory. To be clear, Apple does let users delete a Memory or tell their device to feature a photo or person less often. However, this is a reactionary feature, possible only after something upsetting has happened.

Secondly, iOS 15 changed the Photos widget to link to music-playing slideshows, which is a huge regression.

If the widget on my iPhone shows me a photo of one of my kids enjoying the snow we got last year, I’d like to be able to tap on it to see the photo full-size, with the ability to quickly share it with my wife. If that photo is in a Memory, getting to an individual, specific photo is still a couple of taps away. As bad as that is, the fact that tapping a photo may launch a slideshow with music playing is a huge, huge mistake on Apple’s part. I have come to live in fear of looking at Photos from the widget in quiet environments, worried that some cheesy music is going to start blaring out of my iPhone.

Apple’s Photos application and widget is pretty great, as is the Memory feature, but Apple needs to really look at these features and how they are implemented in iOS 15. There’s a lot of work to do here.