I’m thinking way too much about widgets these days, thanks to iOS 14 most prominent new feature. I’m still reflecting on the possible reasons why the full widgets experience is not available on iPadOS 14. That being said, @mattbirchler this week came out with an interesting and informative video showing how Apple could possibly enable the full widgets experience. This morning, still thinking about this concept, I realized something: Apple doesn’t need to keep the today view support on the iPad in order to enable the full widgets experience.

I would argue that, in fact, Apple should get rid of the today view that came from the iPhone. One of the reason for this is how bad scrolling the today view works when you have a few widgets stacks; if you don’t pay attention on where you put your finger to scroll this view, you actually end up scrolling through the stack itself instead of scrolling the whole view. That’s not a good experience. The other reason is the iPad screen canvas makes it easy to rebuild the side view just by using the right widgets. No need to have scrolling.

I think Apple will eventually come up with an iPad-specific version of the widgets experience but not with the iPadOS 14 releases streak. And that’s too bad.

Learned something really cool today. A few weeks ago I published my review of the well known router, the Unify Dream Machine (available here). The context of this review was the fact that this new router was replacing my aging Apple AirPort. One of the reasons why I chose this device was because of its external look and finish as well as its superb management app.

One of the founder of Ubiquiti is an ex-Apple employee according to this 9to5Mac article: “an ex-Apple employee went on to found a company that currently sells enterprise networking gear. Robert Pera, the founder of Ubiquiti, Incworked for Apple in the early 2000s as a Wi-Fi engineer.”. Woah. It does explain a few things. This article is well worth your time.

My upcoming (and free BTW) Numeric Citizen Introspection Newsletter for September is done. I’m just waiting for September to conclude before hitting the send button. Crafting newsletters like this is so fun. Meanwhile, why not give a look at the first edition?

It’s coming. Two days. Thanks to the soon to be updated Deliveries app. I can “see” where my order is. Can’t wait for version 9.0 launching tomorrow and see how much improved the app is. Can’t wait for my Apple Watch Series 6, coming this Thursday. Still so far from home, yet it feels so close.

I really like what I’m seeing here on macOS. Only request is the default view of a New Post window should show the Title and Categories by default. On the web, the improvements are massive. I’m surprised the Bookmarking feature is available in a new Premium tier only. I want this feature but not the others (podcasting, richer media support). I’ll give it a try while it is free and I’ll see. On iOS and iPadOS, the workflow of selecting a photo from the library is still broken, otherwise, I love the changes. There seems to be speed improvements too. In other words, it is snappier!

All in all, I like where Micro.blog is going with these updates.

Testing an embedded bookmark here.

For the Micro.blog 2.0 launch week, we’ve enabled the new bookmark archiving and highlights feature for everyone to try out. You can upgrade to Micro.blog Premium at any time and also get podcast and video hosting.

Read: www.manton.org

I’ve been a long time satisfied user of Deliveries. They are now switching to a subscription model which isn’t a surprise. I do think the pricing is just about right for the type of app. But, looking more closely to what’s new in the upcoming release, I see support for darkmode which is fine but please, don’t try to sell us this upgrade because you support basic OS features that are available for more than a year. Those should be a given. You may disagree.

Who can remember the Pinball Construction Set? If you do, or you are well documented or you are probably as old as me. Now, consider iOS 14 and the widgets feature: how long before someone comes up with something like a “Widgets Construction Set” for iOS? What I’m seeing now isn’t close enough to my taste.

There is way more content online than we can humanly consume. There, I said it. I’m myself part of the problem, as a content creator too, albeit in a very small tiny fashion. To make things worse, I consider myself a writer. It’s not helping as less and less people are reading these days.

We have to realize that we are only at the early stage of widgets support for iOS 14. There is a lot of untapped potential and frustrating design choices. Widgetsmith is having a moment right now but looks like a work-in-progress to me. It is a great idea but it can be tricky to configure and is not fully intuitive. There is so many more data sources the developer could add. And tell me how I would pay to get weather data in Widgetsmith while I can get it all for free with other apps. The added value of Widgetsmith lies in its configurability, not the fact that you can add weather as a source.