Apple today announced macOS Sonoma, the latest version of its Mac operating system. Launching this fall, macOS Sonoma includes several new features, including desktop widgets, Apple TV-like aerial screensavers, enhancements to apps like Messages and Safari, a new Game mode that prioritizes CPU and GPU performance for gaming, and more.
Apple also showed off iOS 17, watchOS 10, and iPadOS 17.
iOS 17 features personalized contact posters with photos, Memojis, and eye-catching typography that appear during calls and in the updated address book. A new Live Voicemail feature brings live-transcription in real-time, allowing old-school call screening. Users can now pick up the phone mid-voicemail and transcription is handled-on device.
Developer betas will be available starting today, with the final releases expected in the Fall.
And gomorra 😀
Hasnt widgets been tried over and over at least since the days of activeDesktop? people has consistently rejected them for decades by now. Why do apple think it will be better this time around?
NaGERST,
General active-x flakiness aside, I actually liked what could be done with active desktop before it got canned 🙂
It’s quite handy to have for weather and status displays. I even made an interactive multiuser whiteboard for active desktop to take notes and such. Android seems to have put the same general idea for widgets to good use. As long as the execution is good, then I say why not.
They have been tried again and again and every time they were killed.
Active Desktop was nice although it was a security nightmare. Two versions later it was dead
Windows Sidebar was nice (but also had security issues), but two versions later it was dead.
Live tiles were nice, but again two versions later they are dead.
Same on Mac OS. The Widget Dasboard in Mac OS X Tiger was fine, but it was slowly ignored until it was deprecated and then eliminated (in 10.15 Catalina).
iOS also went through this cycle from the start.
Widgets are too small to be worth maintaining platform stability so we have a cycle of reinventing them.
Android is the only platform that managed to avoid this and there widgets are as useful as they have ever been.
Linux desktop maintained support for longer periods. And widgets only projects like Rainmeter are still going strong.
alexvoda,
Yes, active-x was extremely flawed. But I still find widgets as a concept to be useful, hence all the reincarnations that we see of them across platforms. For better or worse though Microsoft has a tendency to reinvent the UI over and over again. One of the software industry’s secrets is that perfecting user experience on an absolute scale is bad for long term sales. The trick for designers is to always have a moving target, otherwise customers get bored and loose interest in upgrading. This lets customers always see things as improving even if they’re going in circles and there’s no final goal to reach.
Rainmeter is still around, so it’s not that people don’t like them. I think it’s just that the commercial ones from big players can’t be relied on as they’re first on the chopping block of cutting expenses. There was probably a lot of development time fixing their security vulnerabilities.
I think they want a spectrum UI language across iOS and macOS, so I assume they want to have users have the widget experience from their iPhone.
Only thing I want them to add back into macOS is the ability to theme… Flavours was an awesome application until they broke the API it was using, and Flavours2 never released to fix it.
Edit: well it did, but was broken again after El Capitan.
That won’t be coming back. It is antithetical to Apple. Just install Asahi Linux with KDE and you can theme everything.