Accessing and Editing the Today View

In this video, we’re going to look at the new redesigned Today view on the iPhone. Let’s go to my iPhone. Now, if you’re not familiar with the Today view, the Today view will give you a glimpse of what is going on today through various widgets.

As an example, we can have a calendar widget, which gives us all of today’s events. We can see what today’s weather, it’s through the weather widget, and reminders that are due today, we can see them through the reminders widget.

So how do we access this Today view? Well, the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure that we’re on our first home screen. You can see that I have a white dot on the left side. I’m on the first home screen. How do we get to that first home screen? When we swipe to the left or right, you may know that we can get to our different screens, but if we keep swiping over to the right, I’m on my first home screen here; I swipe to the right again. I’m in the Today view.

So I’m looking at various widgets. As I mentioned earlier, these are widgets. Here’s my calendar widget. This would tell me any I have going on today. I do not have any that are going on today. I can see what today’s weather is. I can see what the top stories are in the news. I swipe up. I can also see how different stocks are doing that I’m watching.

When I tap on any one of these widgets, it’ll open up that particular app. So if I tap on the stocks app here, watch what happens. It opens up the Stocks app. To get back to the Today view, all I have to do is swipe up, and it brings me back to my Today view. So they’ve redesigned this Today view.

This Today view was always available, but it’s just been redesigned. So what did they change? Well, the big thing is, is they changed the different sizes of the widgets. We can see, we have two widgets that span across my home screen here. These are my smaller widgets. I also have a little bit larger widget here, and then I have a full-size widget here. We can also have stacks.

We can stack these widgets on top of each other. I’ll talk about that in another lesson; we have nice rounded corners with these widgets. And of course, developers can develop widgets for their apps as well. I use things so I can add a things widget to my today view. I can then see what is due today in my things app, which is a to-do app to edit this. I swipe up, and at the very bottom, you’re going to see ‘edit.’ Also, what I can do is tap and hold on any one of these wedges to go into the jiggly mode. So I’m going to go with my Stocks app here; I tap and hold on it. And then we have our jiggly mode. Now what I’m able to do is remove any widgets. I can drag them around to reorder them.

If I want to create a stack, I stack them on top of each other. Again, I’ll talk about that and another lesson. And then, if I want to add a widget, I tap on the plus here. And I have my library of widgets. So we have some featured widgets here. And then, if I keep swiping up, I get a list of all of the different widgets that I can add. When you add a new third party app, you may want to go back to this library of widgets and see if they have a widget to add to the today view.

So I want to add a photos widget. I tap on photos. And now we have a few different sizes. I just swipe to choose the size that I want. Remember, we have different size widgets. Once I have the widget I want, I drag it up and place it where I want. When I’m finished, I tap on done. And now I’ve just added that widget. And then to get back to my home screen, I can swipe over to the left, and I’m back at my home screen to go to my new redesigned today view. I swipe to the right, and I’m back in my today view. Again, I tap on any widget to open up that particular app.

So that’s the new Today view on the iPhone. The Today view comprises of various widgets. These widgets can now be different sizes. We can easily rearrange them by dragging them around. And then we also have a library of widgets that we can add to our today view.

So that’s the Today view on the iPhone with iOS 14.