widgets

  • December 29, 2022

    Simplifying my iPhone Home Screen

    Since widgets came out with iOS 15, I’ve been obsessed with finding the right amount of information to fit on that screen…the perfect combo of accessibility and glanceability.

    I had multiple pages, customizable by focus modes, with widgets galore…until a few days ago.

    I came to a realization that I wasn’t using most of the widgets and the multiple pages made it harder for me to find what I wanted quickly.

    So I decided to do 2 things:

    1. Simplify my home screens to be 1 page + the App Library1
    2. Make use of the hidden “Today” screen for widgets I want to reference or use but don’t always want to see.

    The result is this:

    My Today screen and sole Home Screen page

    The left shows the Today screen, which includes the big calendar widget with all of my appointments and such. It also includes:

    1. Drafts’ quick actions widget for fast input
    2. A shortcuts widget for commonly used shortcuts I don’t keep on my Home Screen.
    3. And then below the fold, a number of Home+ widgets for controlling my home and scenes.

    The right show’s my sole Home Screen page, which includes:

    1. A medium widget stack with CARROT Weather, another calendar widget with just the date and upcoming appointments, and recent Drafts
    2. A small widget stack with links to my Dashboard and the Today note in Craft
    3. A small widget stack with Apple Music and Overcast.

    The icons, from top to bottom and left to right are:

    1. The Phone
    2. PCalc (the best calculator app)
    3. The “I have an idea” shortcut, which takes text or voice input and adds a Draft and a note to Craft
    4. The “Read” shortcut, which gives me a list of reading apps, including Reader by Readies, Substack, Kindle, News, and a link to my unsorted notes in Craft
    5. The “Journal” shortcut, which takes text or voice input and adds a bullet item to my today note in Craft2
    6. The Clock app, so I can see the time down to the second.
    7. The “Add Task” shortcut, which creates a new task in Omnifocus
    8. The “Money” shortcut, which gives me a list of all the financial apps I check each morning

    And then the dock: Safari, Messages, Craft, Omnifocus.

    A couple of bonus screenshots:

    My Lock Screen with Overcast, Temperature, and Battery widgets
    Executing the Read shortcut
    Executing the Journal shortcut

    I’d love to know: what does your iPhone home screen look like? Do you use widgets? And what about the Lock Screen?

    1. I still have some specific pages for Focus Modes like Travel and “Green Zone,” but the same rules apply. ?
    2. I’m trying to journal more but not in any kind of formal process. Just random thoughts throughout the day. ?

  • December 23, 2015

    WordPress Database Encoding & the Case of Disappearing Widgets

    Recently I was updating the widgets on my homepage to promote the new WP in One Month. I decided to do so with the logo and a caption, making Jetpack’s Image Widget the perfect candidate. I uploaded the logo, added a title, then copy and pasted the text from the website’s ‘Jumbotron’ area for the caption. I clicked ‘Save’ and something strange happened: all of the Image Widgets, everywhere on my site, disappeared. I tried to do the same thing with a Text Widget, thinking maybe there’s a bug in Jetpack’s Image Widget or it doesn’t allow certain text/markup. After going through the same steps and clicking ‘Save’ every Text Widget on the site disappeared. I decided (really, was forced) to do some investigating.

    (more…)