2020 was a tough year for the Informant team, and we’ve had one request from our vocal group of users that has stood out amongst all the others — home screen widgets. As much as we would have loved to have had the bandwidth last year to plan and develop the iOS 14 widgets before the official iOS 14 production release, we were unfortunately unable to do so.
With that being said, we are happy to announce that we are currently in beta testing and will be doing a public release once that is finished. Until then, we wanted to give a sneak peek at what’s to come.
3-day Large Widget & Small Widgets
2-day Large Widget & Small Widgets – Dark & Light Modes
1-day Large Widget & Small Widgets – Dark & Light Modes
Medium Widget – Dark & Light Modes
Here are some examples of customization options that will be a part of the coming release.
We look forward to getting these released to production after finishing the beta testing and working through any major bugs and needed revisions. We also welcome any and all feedback as we work towards improving the widgets, so feel free to contact us here. Stay tuned!
This is very nice. It is, as you note, “late” , but it looks as if the wait will be well rewarded.
So, the new widget has now been released (thank you). The release notes indicate that it is a work in progress. Is the ability to toggle between light and dark themes part of that “not yet”? If not, how does one change the theme?
Hi Erik, currently the only way to have the widgets appear in light or dark mode is to change the device settings. A quick way to do this without going into your device settings is to do the following:
Dark mode can be switched on and off from the Control Center by swiping down on the upper-right corner of the screen. Long press on the brightness shader and tap the Dark Mode icon in the bottom left corner to turn the feature on and off.
We do have a release planned at the end of this month that will have some much requested widget changes. With that being said, the iOS 14 widgets won’t ever be the full-featured product that our team would have liked, but this process will greatly help us in creating a much more customizable and feature-packed iOS 15 widget. It will also put us in a position where we will be able to release the widgets around the same time as iOS 15 is released to the public.
Thanks for your patience, and let us know if you have any other feedback.
Hooray! Many thanks for your efforts at a difficult time. I’m among those for whom a homescreen widget was the #1 wishlist item, and #2 wasn’t remotely close.
Two quick thoughts as you work through the early stages:
1) Event display looks great, but I do hope we’ll be able to include all-day events in future updates. Currently they do not display, so things like birthdays, holidays, etc. are left out.
2) Weather integration doesn’t seem to be working. Happy bonus if it shows up at some point, but all-day events are far more important, IMO.
Thanks so much, and looking forward to seeing how it progresses!
Thanks for the feedback, Dominic. All-day events have been a common request we’ve been hearing, and we have already started work on this revision. Look for that change in the next release! Weather should be working on the widgets, and I see that you have a support case open with that info. I’ve let our developers know and we’ll look more into what may be the cause.
Let us know if you have any other feedback!