Apple's new WidgetKit: Windows Phone Live Tiles done right? Apple introduced WidgetKit during day two of its WWDC developer event yesterday, describing it as "the best way to bring your app's most useful information to the home screen." Widgets in iOS are not completely new. In earlier versions, widgets lived in the Today view, accessed when you swipe right from the home page on an …
Have an upvote because that was my first thought too. I'm not sure that the IOS experience is going to match the Android one either. I've got Apple owning friends who think that's the one (and only) thing Android does better. I had a Microsoft Nokia and live tiles was an odd experience. Maybe Apple will get it spot on only time will tell.
Hopefully, for iPhone users, the comparison should be to Google Widgets. The ideal widget is one that shows key, useful, information from an app and allows you to open the app to dig deeper. My home screen is dominated by Calendar, Weather, Clock, and Keep.
That said, this is just Apple copying what Android users have taken for granted for years.
It takes time to admit that Steve Jobs was wrong.
From the description it sounds more like the widgets from Symbian, as seen in Anna and Belle or Sony's souped up widgets on Xperia Android devices. Those all generally display mostly static or lazily updated snippets of information from an app (not Live Tile distraction levels). A given app may present different views and levels of detail, depending on the widget's size/shape. And the whole drag to resize demonstrated with other widgets flowing around it, is not exactly groundbreaking either.
It wasn't even new when Android did it... but in fairness, Google didn't claim that home-screen widgets were anything special; apps being able to display summary status was seen as a basic feature of a mobile device.
It looks like Apple is copying Windows Live Tiles, which weren't true "widgets", as they didn't allow you to issue commands to an app: all you could do was click them, so they are more like hyperlinks that present a preview of their destination. But when they were done properly, they were very powerful way of managing the information that a phone can deliver. An app user could create a live-tile for any specific content that an app could access, with made them very effective for narrowing the scope of notifications, and as such they're something I really miss since moving to Android with its cacophony of pointless notification alerts (yes, I know how to turn them off; my complaint is that I shouldn't have to: they shouldn't be on by default).
Examples of live-tiles that worked: in a podcast app you can pin a few of your favourite feeds to the front page, and you'll see when those are updated, without being bothered by updates for the other podcasts you follow less frequently; or, pin a particular contact in a communications app, and you will see notification of when they contact you, not when anyone has contacted you via that app.
The Live Tile idea is based on well-proven principles of how people construct mental models of tasks: it shifts the focus onto the object of interest (your contact, the location you want a weather forecast for, your favourite podcast, your family photos album), and not the tool or method (the apps that provide you with those services). Understand that, and you can see why some brand-name social app developers were so lukewarm on Windows Phone - it shifted control of the interaction back toward the user.
Against that, the initial implementation of live tiles was visually far too "busy" and distracting, and by the time that was addressed, the fate of Windows Phone had already been sealed by developer decisions.
None of my Android apps on my home screen offer content except a notification dot, and the calendar app icon tells you what day of the month it is (which I only just realised).
Unlike Apple, where you can see how many texts and emails you have from the icon.
I liked Windows Mobile, where you didn't have separate widgets and app icons. A tile could show you genuinely useful information like the weather forecast, emails, etc - there are lots of times I open an app to see one thing that could've been displayed on the icon.
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