Are there any plans to include support for widgets. I can’t see it is supported in Sonoma, or iOS.?
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No, there are no current plans for widgets.
What kind of widgets do you have in mind? We actually supported Dashboard a long time ago but in the end that was a waste of time to be honest. And of course there’s the Sorter which can handle most of the typical widget tasks via its menu extra or tab.
It is the primary feature of Sonoma.There are a myriad of use cases. It needs a little bit of imagination.Some examples of the top of my head.
List of reading list items.
List of items in Inbox.
List of metadata attributes for examples particular labels, or important items.
List of due items.
You could imagine having a configurable setting where you could change it to whatever you wish for your productivity.
Clearly as developers this is your decision. I am not a programer so maybe dont appreciate the complexities involved. However…to be honest I am somewhat disappointed that you wont be supporting widgets.
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You can use Alfred + this: mpco/AlfredWorkflow-DEVONthink-Search: Powerful Tool for Searching in DEVONthink. (github.com)
And can do most of the widgets can do, faster and better. There are some messages here about that.
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Would be great on DTTG.
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Great in what way? Again, examples would be useful.
Would love to see this size widget with 4 or 8 “buttons” to click. (Sorry skipped the photo for privacy reasons to just show the top).
Many people use an inbox, daily note, reading list, recent projects etc. While much of this is possible (aka take a devonthink url and then make a shortcut to “open url” to my inbox note) some of these options are unlikely to be setup by most users. I would assume some of this setup might need to include more standardized locations such as global inbox, and if daily notes would be included maybe they would default to a standard folder.
The dream would be that you could assign a button to say “meeting” and it would open your meeting template, pull it into your predefined folder, and then be ready to go (similar to DTP). Some of these functions are more difficult to setup especially on DTTG iOS with the current shortcuts, so using some high yield/common types of documents with mobile focus (which input text, pre-filled templates, or option to quickly review data mobile) would be nice.
I’ve went back to obsidian for much of this as it’s so much easier to template an iOS file system shortcut for a markdown file into obsidians folder. This makes it agnostic to app. DTTG is still sandboxed from shortcuts app to use the files integration and no option for an iOS “indexed” folder yet, so this doesn’t work unless files are all manually moved to DTTG later.
I think there are tons of potential use cases.
Unfortunately Apple appears to have implemented widgets at this time with two fatal flaws in my view:
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You cannot set up widgets on a “per Space” or per Desktop basis. Any widget you add appears on all of your Desktops.
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There is a good bit of discussion on Reddit and elsewhere about limitations on dynamic and/or interactive widgets
I think after people start playing with widgets on a practical basis, they are DOA unless/until Apple fixes these issues.
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Perhaps a silly question: how are they different from shortcuts?
Widgets are always on your desktop and can continuously update information; examples would be a stock ticker or current weather report or the next-up item on your schedule.
That’s different from a shortcut which you need to activate from a menu or keyboard shortcut and which may have minimal if any UI involvement.
One example of a widget might be buttons to press to activate a choice of shortcuts.
I think this would be an inefficient use of a widget given they’re on the desktop, not accessible in-app. That’s also why I don’t see much utility in them, except for light occasional use.
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Not everything that is possible (or imaginable) is also useful or only few users are interested in it (especially on the Mac). Just like everybody was excited initially about Dashboard. We’ll see how this evolves and what’s important for our users…
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I’m not a widget fan. Tried them on iOS numerous times, but always go into dis-use, frankly.
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Ah, those things. Another half-baked thing, will probably be abandoned in the future. Like the “Dashboard” of yore. It’s a pattern:
- AppleScrip: No development since ages, lagging behind any modern programming language in features
- JXA: never polished and abandoned
- Automator: half-baked, abandoned
- Shortcuts: half-baked, buggy, no development
- Pages/Numbers: no useful (!) automation ever, but shiny “features” like 3D diagrams
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Don’t forget more than 100 screensavers and desktop backgrounds! Very important.
(When “butterfly case” a lot of professionals abandoned Apple, and it seems now there is a second batch of pros who are going to abandon Apple… Two of my friends are doing it just now, and I’m only tied with DT/DTTG and PDF annotation in iPad --No Android/Windows app is able to work like iOS ones).
Ah, forgot to say: and if Windows Copilot accomplishes what it promises… well, I think macOS is dead for true professionals, and iThings/aThings will be only for unbrained prosumers and lusers.
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And so exciting!
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One DT3-specific use case for a Widget might be a running list of recently added files.
Sure it can be done in other ways - but it would be useful to many people to have such a list easily accessible on the desktop.
Another use would be a running list of files in a specific Group. If that group were an RSS feed then the widget would act as the UI for DT3 as an RSS reader.
But where to? I don’t want to touch Windows, and I came from Linux …
Good question. One is thinking to go back to Windows (he is a YouTuber as hobby) and I don’t know the other, that is a hobby podcaster. I think both of them has Windows in their main jobs, like me.
Well, in my case the only rope is DT/DTTG. I got the Samsung Tab S9 and S9 Ultra and most of my non-PDF stuff is done with them at home: email, YouTube, chatting, handwriting, … The sensation of writing of the Samsung stylus is a lot of better than the iPad one, that feels like scratching in glass. I have an indexed folder and swap things between DT/DTTG and Android/Windows.