- Notification Center's Main Window
- Quick Strategies for Personalizing Notification Center
- Informative Notification Center Widgets You Can Add to Your iPhone
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Informative Notification Center Widgets You Can Add to Your iPhone
Available on the iPhone, Notification Center widgets are mini apps that appear at the top and/or bottom of the Notification Center window. They display very specific information.
A Weather Widget and Stock Widget come preinstalled in iOS 5 for the iPhone. When turned on and customized, the Weather Widget (which is automatically tied to the Weather app) shows the current weather forecast for your location (as shown in Figure 4.11), but in a concise way.
){kind=link}
Figure 4.11. Quickly see the current weather forecast, which includes the current temperature, the day’s high and low temperature, and a graphic that depicts the overall weather outlook for the day.
Meanwhile, the Stock Widget offers a scrolling ticker of the stocks and investments you have stored as part of a personal portfolio using the iPhone’s Stocks app (which also comes preinstalled).
With the launch of iOS 5, the Weather Widget and Stock Widget are the only widgets that come preinstalled. In the future, Apple and/or third-party developers will most likely release additional widgets that can be used with Notification Center to display specific information in the Notification Center window.
To customize the Weather Widget, from your iPhone’s Home Screen, tap on the Weather icon. When the weather forecast screen appears, as shown in Figure 4.12, tap on the circular Info (i) icon.
){kind=link}
)
Figure 4.12. The main Weather app on the iPhone.
At the top of the Weather setup screen (shown in Figure 4.13), turn the virtual switch associated with the Local Weather option to the on position. This is data that will be displayed by the Weather Widget in Notification Center. If this option is turned off, the city that’s currently active in the Weather app is displayed in the Weather Widget.
){kind=link}
Figure 4.13. From the Weather app’s setup screen, turn the virtual switch associated with the Local Weather option to the on position.
To customize the Stock Widget, from the iPhone’s Home Screen, launch the Stocks app. Next, tap the circular Info icon. To add stocks or investments, tap the plus-sign icon that appears in the upper-left corner of the screen. Or to delete a stock or an investment from the portfolio stored in the app, tap on the red-and-white icon containing the negative sign that’s next to the investment you want to remove.
When you’ve customized your portfolio, tap on the blue-and-white Done icon displayed in the upper-right corner of the screen. This will return you to the main Stocks screen. This is the information that will now appear as part of the Stocks Widget in the Notification Center window (as shown in Figure 4.14).
){kind=link}
Figure 4.14. The Stock Widget appears at the bottom of the Notification Center window. This is an iPhone-specific feature.