How to Install Notification Center Widgets
Once you’ve got some apps that support widgets installed on your phone, enabling widgets is a snap. Just follow these 4 steps:
How to Use Widgets
Once you’ve installed some widgets, using them is easy. Just swipe down to reveal Notification Center and swipe through it to find the widget you want. Some widgets won’t let you do much (the Yahoo Weather widget, for instance, just shows your local weather with a nice picture). For those, just tap on them to go to the full app. Others let you use the app without leaving the Notification Center. For instance, Evernote offers shortcuts to creating new notes, while the to-do list app Finish lets you mark tasks completed or add new ones.
What Are Notification Center Widgets?
Think of a widget as a mini-app that lives within the Notification Center. Notification Center used to be a collection of short text notifications sent by apps that you couldn’t do much with. Widgets essentially take selected features of apps and make them available in Notification Center so you can use them quickly without opening another app. There are two important things to understand about widgets:
Not all apps offer widgets. Support for the widgets must be built into an app, so not every app on your phone — even the ones that otherwise work with Notification Center — will be compatible.You can’t get widgets on their own. Because the feature has to be built into a larger app, you can’t just download a widget by itself. It’s an integral part of the app it comes from, so you need the full app installed on your phone, too.
To find apps that offer widgets, search the App Store for “Notification Center Widgets.”
