iOS 14 is Here. Where are the Microsoft Widgets? (Premium)
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Apple released iOS 14, but Microsoft—one of the few companies with experience with at-a-glance UIs—isn’t ready with its own widgets. Why?
It’s a reasonable question. One of the many innovations that debuted with Windows Phone 7 in 2010, Microsoft’s belated response to the iPhone, was its live tiles-based user interface through which apps and hubs could display “at-a-glance” information—the weather forecast, news headlines, your most recent unread emails and schedule events, and so on—without requiring the user to open and close apps. That this was superior to the mobile interface offered by Apple with the iPhone—and copied by Google with Android—was then and is now obvious: I refer to those interfaces as “whack a mole” because you had to—still have to—go in and out of apps to get at the information they contain.
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