This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Using and Configuring Widgets
New! Widgets are “mini” versions of apps installed on your iPhone that you can access easily and quickly from the Widget Center.
Accessing Widgets
You can open the Widget Center in a number of ways:
Wake your iPhone and swipe to the right.
Move to a Home page and swipe to the right.
Swipe down the screen to open the Notification Center and then swipe to the right.
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At the top of the Widget Center, you see the Search tool (more on this later) and the current time and date if you open it from the Lock screen or just the current date if you open it another way. Beneath that, you see widgets for apps installed on your iPhone (as you’ll see, you can choose which widgets you see and what order they are in). Swipe up and down the screen to browse your widgets.
Each widget provides information or functions based on its app. For example, you can use the FAVORITES widget to place phone calls using the Phone app or to make FaceTime calls to your contacts you’ve designated as Favorites (you learn how to do this in Chapter 8, “Communicating with the Phone and FaceTime Apps”). You can see your daily calendar in the CALENDAR widget, get news in the NEWS widget, or listen to music in the MUSIC widget.
You can expand a widget to show all of its information or tools by tapping the Show More command or collapse it to a more minimal state by tapping the Show Less command.
You can interact with widgets in several ways. Some widgets provide information that you can view within the widget, such as CALENDAR, STOCKS, or UP NEXT. Some apps provide buttons you can tap to perform specific actions, these include FAVORITES and MUSIC. When you tap something within a widget, the associated app opens and either performs the task you indicated or shows more information about what you selected.
Some apps even have multiple widgets. For example, the Calendar app has the UP NEXT widget that shows you the next event on your calendar and the CALENDAR widget that shows the events on the current date.
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If you don’t move into an app from a widget, you can close the Widget Center by swiping to the left. You move back to the screen you came from, such as a Home screen. If you do move into an app from a widget, you work with that app just as if you moved into it from a Home screen.
Configuring the Widget Center
You can determine which widgets are shown in the Widget Center and the order in which those widgets appear on the screen; for example, you might want your most frequently used widgets to be at the top of the screen.
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To configure the Widget Center, swipe all the way up the screen and tap Edit. You see the Add Widgets screen.
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This screen has two sections. At the top are the widgets currently installed; installed widgets have the remove buttons (red circle with a – in its center) next to their icons. Toward the bottom of the screen, you see the MORE WIDGETS section that shows you available widgets that aren’t currently on your Widget Center. Along the right side of the screen are the order buttons that you can use to change the order in which the widgets appear on the screen.
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To remove a widget, tap its remove button (red circle with a –); then tap Remove. The widget is removed from the Widget Center but remains available to you should you want to add it again.
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To change where a widget appears on the Widget Center, drag its order button up or down the screen. When it is in the position you want, take your finger off the screen and the widget is placed there.
To add widgets, swipe up the screen until you see the MORE WIDGETS section. In this section, you see the widgets not currently installed in the Widget Center. These are marked with the add button (a green circle with a +).
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To add a widget to the Widget Center, tap its add button. The widget jumps up the screen to become the last widget on the installed list (you can drag it up the list to reposition the widget on the Widget Center).
When you’re done making changes to the Widget Center, tap Done. You return to the Widget Center and see the results of the changes you’ve made.