Missing iPad Apps Are Now Widgets?

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Posted February 2, 2010 at 11:57pm by Shalom Levytam

You may have noticed that the iPad is missing some built-in system apps such as Weather, Stocks, Clock and Calculator.

Kevin Fox from Fury.com believes that "These apps are missing from the launchpad because they’re no longer apps. They’re dashboard widgets."

John Gruber from Daring Fireball notes that until April 2007, the iPhone 1.0 Weather, Stocks, and Calculator apps were Dashboard-style HTML/JavaScript widgets. Jobs called them “widgets” on stage at the MWSF iPhone debut, and I later verified it with informed sources. (The iPhone OS 1.0 jailbreakers even found an empty /Library/Widgets/ folder.) Apple scrapped them and reimplemented them as native apps late in the game because the performance just wasn’t there — they all felt sluggish.

Fox and Gruber's thoughts differ on how these widgets will work. Fox believes that the widgets will work in a way similar to the Mac OS X Dashboard. Gruber thinks they will live right on the Home screen, explaining why the home screen is so sparse.

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Aaron - February 3, 2010 at 9:34am

why do ppl think this iPad was supposed to be an iPad Air or something?? stop complaining. it is exactly what it is supposed to be.. I like it and would buy one, so its targeted at ppl lik me.

Mike - March 13, 2010 at 8:15am

The widget system will hopefully mimic NetVibes and such like, i.e. appear actually on the home page. The dashboard for OSX is awful, it just doesn't seem connected with the rest of the operating system / UI experience. The best thing Apple could do would be to scrap the dashboard and have a NetVibes type approach.