Yesterday I got news that a set of software critical for me had been patched and confirmed working on Sonoma so I decided to update my 14" MacBook Pro. Whenever updating to a major new version, I like to clean up my desktop, maybe change the wallpaper and do some QoL stuff I've left hanging.
In the process I became curious about widgets as I've found them very helpful on the iPhone. Unfortunately the macOS implementation feels lacking. Either the widgets display too little information to be really useful or they are so big that they now take up roughly a fifth of my desktop space.
This made me think of the Dashboard. It was essentially widgets, just separate from the desktop. (And something Apple recently killed in favor for Sonoma widgets.) Of course I tried being clever and thought I'll just make myself a new desktop space dedicated to widgets. It would work much like Dashboard. Right? Well, it seems any widgets you place are stuck in every space you have. Even on iOS you can have different widgets on different home screen pages, so why doesn't the same logic apply to macOS?
The positive side is that with all this widget stuff on my desktop, I really have no desire to put anything else there, keeping it clean. Or rather it would be clean if the widgets had a consistent look. The battery widget is translucent, the calendar widget is mostly solid color and the weather widget has a life of its own tied to the weather. In addition to this, I use a widget from Sun Surveyor and it has its own color scheme for data.
All this together looks like an inconsistent mess. I might just see what I can cram into the notification center and forget about the rest. But it's also frustrating having my notifications AND my widgets in the same place, because then they compete for attention.
Please, someone just resurrect the Dashboard. It was the perfect solution for the exact problem the Sonoma widgets have created. Apart from being inconsistent because my god was it colorful and all over the place – which is why I loved having it in its own self-contained world.
Bonus rant: I just noticed that if I open notification center and click on Edit Widgets, it also makes my desktop widgets visible, and because my desktop widgets are almost exclusively placed to the right edge of the screen, I was instantly confused about why my massive weather widget is suddenly showing up in the notification center.
In the process I became curious about widgets as I've found them very helpful on the iPhone. Unfortunately the macOS implementation feels lacking. Either the widgets display too little information to be really useful or they are so big that they now take up roughly a fifth of my desktop space.
This made me think of the Dashboard. It was essentially widgets, just separate from the desktop. (And something Apple recently killed in favor for Sonoma widgets.) Of course I tried being clever and thought I'll just make myself a new desktop space dedicated to widgets. It would work much like Dashboard. Right? Well, it seems any widgets you place are stuck in every space you have. Even on iOS you can have different widgets on different home screen pages, so why doesn't the same logic apply to macOS?
The positive side is that with all this widget stuff on my desktop, I really have no desire to put anything else there, keeping it clean. Or rather it would be clean if the widgets had a consistent look. The battery widget is translucent, the calendar widget is mostly solid color and the weather widget has a life of its own tied to the weather. In addition to this, I use a widget from Sun Surveyor and it has its own color scheme for data.
All this together looks like an inconsistent mess. I might just see what I can cram into the notification center and forget about the rest. But it's also frustrating having my notifications AND my widgets in the same place, because then they compete for attention.
Please, someone just resurrect the Dashboard. It was the perfect solution for the exact problem the Sonoma widgets have created. Apart from being inconsistent because my god was it colorful and all over the place – which is why I loved having it in its own self-contained world.
Bonus rant: I just noticed that if I open notification center and click on Edit Widgets, it also makes my desktop widgets visible, and because my desktop widgets are almost exclusively placed to the right edge of the screen, I was instantly confused about why my massive weather widget is suddenly showing up in the notification center.