19 Tips For Using Desktop Widgets On Your Mac

The new Desktop Widgets feature of macOS Sonoma makes widgets more useful than ever before. Here are some ideas on how you can use this new powerful feature to get the most from your Mac.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for getting the most from Desktop Widgets on your Mac.
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A new feature in macOS Sonoma is the ability to put widgets right on your Desktop. There is a lot you can do with that simple feature. So first let's take a look at the basics. To add widgets to your Desktop the easiest way is to Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on the Desktop and select Edit Widgets. Now you get the widget's panel down here and you can scroll through all the different categories, find a widget you want to add, and simply drag it to the Desktop and put it wherever you want on the Desktop. Notice that it will snap in position if you are near the top or sides, and if you are in the middle you can just stick it wherever you want and you can add it right there. 
Once you've added it you don't need to bring up the Editor again to do a lot of things with it. For instance, you can Control Click, right click or two-finger click on the widget and this brings up a Context Menu. From here you can Remove the widget or if it is a more complex widget you can do other options. We'll look at those. 
Let's add another widget here. I'm going to add the Weather widget. Then I'll click Done. If I were to Control Click on this you see that I can remove this widget. I can also change its size. Like that. I could also Edit the widget. In this case with the Weather you can change the location for that forecast. So I just click here, where it says My Location, and now I can choose another location for that weather. There will be different options depending upon what the widget does. 
Now most widgets are interactive in some way. The simplest way they can be interactive is you click on them and it takes you to the App that the widget belongs to. So in this case it will open up the Weather App and take me right to that location. A lot of widgets will do this. Simply going to the appropriate place in the app. 
But other widgets let you do other things directly in the widget. So let's go to Edit Widgets right here and I'm going to go to Reminders. I'm going to add a Reminders' List widget here. Now another way to edit it is while you're in the editing mode you can click on it and it will go to Edit without having to Control Click on it. I can change the list here. So let's go and take a look at, say, this grocery list and Done. Now you see it lists groceries there. With this kind of widget you can either interact directly with the widget. So if I click on the circle next to an item it completes the item. Other widgets will simple let you click them to go to the app but to a certain location. So, for instance, I can add a News widget here and if I click on a specific story in the widget it will take me right to that story. 
Now before I showed you that when you drag widgets they will snap to the edges to put them in a nice, neat grid like this. You can actually move widgets on the Desktop without going into editing mode. So I can grab and drag this widget here and as long as I place it in the middle of nowhere I can position it into any pixel position I want. As soon as I get near another widget it snaps to a grid. You see I have lots of different options here like this. You can snap to the top right corner as well. To the bottom underneath the Dock there. So you have lots of different options for how to arrange things. 
Now when you also have icons on your Desktop, whether they are for drives or for files, you can't place the icons on top of a widget or vice versa. So if I were to drag this icon over here and try to drop it onto the widget it will simply not allow that. I can place it next to the widget but as soon as I try to do it a little bit on top of it it will just go back to its last location. Likewise if I were to Move a widget to where some icons were it pushes them aside. But it is not permanently relocating them. Because notice if I drag this widget away those snap back to their actual location. Of course if you have View and then Sort By set to something then your icons are going to position themselves and then moving a widget will simply push them out of the way so they flow around it. 
Now if you bring up another app you may notice that the widgets remain here on the Desktop behind the app. But they kind of fade into a monochrome mode. You've got control over this. So go into System Settings and then in Desktop & Dock look for the section on Widgets. You can set the widget style to automatic meaning that when that when the Desktop is in the foreground, I'll press F11 to do that, they are full color. Then if there is another window in the way then they are going to be monochrome. You can also say you want them to be Full Color All The Time, or Monochrome All The Time. 
Also notice the setting here for Show Widgets on the Desktop, so you can actually turn it Off and you won't see them on the Desktop. So it is a way to maybe have them available but switch them On or Off when you need it. But you also have the setting here for In Stager Manager. So with this On, if I switch to Stage Manager, you'll see I see the widgets even when I'm using an app in Stage Manager. But if I turn it Off they are not there unless I click on the Desktop to just have the Desktop visible in Stage Manager. As soon as I switch back to an app, you see, they are gone. 
We look at the Calendar widget you can put an Up Next widget there which is useful. You can also just put the Date which is kind of neat to have here at the upper right hand corner or perhaps even a monthly calendar like that if you need it. But a particular use is this list here. If you put that there it is going to show you your upcoming events even if all of those events are today or maybe they are spread out over the next couple of weeks. But when you Control Click it to Edit it you'll see there are options here to either mirror the Calendar App, which will just show you what you would see in a list there, with the Calendars you have On, switched On, and the ones you have switched Off. But if you Off you can actually select the specific calendars for that list. So you can customize this so it only shows you, say, work events.
Clocks have actually two main types of clock. The mains clocks here, Clock 1, Clock 2, and Clock 3 show the current time according to your settings. But underneath that are City 1, City 2, and City 3. The thing you can do with those is you can specify a location. So you may not really need to have it additional indicator of what time it is right here. But if you wanted to show some other place you can have a clock for that. If you want to show several of those you can get these two different groups of 4 here and customize which clocks are shown for those four clock faces. 
Now an interesting feature that isn't immediately obvious is you can use several widgets from the same app. So, for instance, I can drag two of these City clocks here and I'll leave this one here at Cupertino but I'll change this one here to be another city, like that. I can have a whole row of these if I want. You can do the same for a lot of other apps. Like for instance the Weather App. You can have the forecast for one city and the forecast for another city. Or the Stocks App. You can use the symbol one here and have it for a single stock and then for a second widget you can set it to something else. Then you can have a whole string of those as well. 
One that seems really simple but actually is one of the most interesting, I think, is the Contacts one. So you can take a Contact's widget, let's take one that has two items in here, and we can set the two of them here to be a specific contact. So I'll set these two here, like that. Now you'll see those contacts there. But when you click on one you'll actually get the option to do something like Start a new email message or Message them or Call them. 
The Batteries widget allows you to set a battery indicator for different devices that you've connected to your Mac. Now in this case all I have here in this demo account is to setup this one MacBook Air so it shows this battery percentage for my MacBook Air. But if I had AirPods connected to it and an iPhone with the same Apple ID I should be able to put battery indicators for those two things here as well. 
Now if you look through the apps that you've got here for widgets you'll notice that some of them are for apps that aren't even on your Mac. So, for instance, right here this is from my iPhone. You can actually see it right here at the top right. It says, From iPhone. As a matter of fact if you go to All Widgets and you browse through you'll sometimes see an app that says On Mac or From iPhone and you can switch between them to get different widgets from those devices. So when you choose a widget that is just from your iPhone then you'll actually get a widget that is generated by your iPhone and sent using Continuity over to your Mac. So you're not just limited to what apps you have installed on your Mac. You can use the ones on your iPhone as well to display widgets.
Now one of the most powerful widgets is the Shortcuts Widget. The way to use that is first in your Shortcuts App create a folder and populate that with a few widgets. I'm just going to use two here because I want to create a two button widget. So I've got these and then I can go and add the widget for a Shortcuts set of buttons right here. I'll use this one here and I'll Control Click it and then Edit it and then Set the folder to be the folder that I created. So there are those two widgets. So now I can run these shortcuts right here from clicking on the Desktop. So that one is the Calculator App and this one generates the Sunset time. 
Some apps have extra large widgets. So if you look here on the side options, say for Shortcuts, you got extra large which is way bigger than what is available on the iPhone.  So made for the Mac's screen. When you look through widgets it is hard to tell which are the big ones. But usually you get this large square one here and then you get one that is kind of double the width but has to shrink down to fit to that space. That's the extra large one. So look for widgets that have that size. 
The Photos App is also really interesting in that you cannot only pick a featured photo here but you can also specifically select a photo by choosing an Album. So when you choose an album like this and then you Edit it, you can choose exactly which Album you wanted to show. Now you can only show one picture at a time. So there is one photo there. But if you want control and you really want to show a single photo then create a Photo Album, I've created one here called Desktop Widget. I've only put one photo in it. So now if I were to choose that particular photo then I'm going to get just that one photo all the time. So it is a great way to put a photo of a family member right on your Desktop, like you might actually have on your real desk, and have that there. Of course you can include several of those. You can do a small version of this and then have several pictures across the top or along the side or whatever. 
But you could also use this to show information. So notice here in the Photos App I've created another album called Desktop Note. In there I've made up a graphic with some information. Now I just did some keyboard shortcuts but it could be anything. It could be something pertaining to work. Some phone numbers you need to have. Some information that is important to you. Instead of putting a post-it note on the side of your screen with it, make a graphic of it using a Graphics App or even doing it in Preview or something. Then stick that there. The size of this particular widget here is square. So just make it square and make sure the text is large enough where you'll be able to read it at this size and then if you change to that album, like that, then you'll get that on your Desktop instead. So a little reference sheet there. 
Now here is an interesting technique that I think a lot of people will adopt. If you want to change which widgets are available but you hate leaving one because then you have to select all the options again if you add it, use Notification Center as a holding place. So it is very easy to drag a widget from Notification Center onto the Desktop and vice versa. So you can simply move things there and then you have the widget you want there. If you want to change it again you can drag something in and drag something back out. So, for instance, you can have a whole list of news widgets here for different topics. Simply drag the ones that you want to pay attention to on that particular day onto your Desktop and leave the rest in Notification Center. 
Here's my last tip. You can use your Desktop as a whole Dashboard. Either have it on your regular Desktop or maybe, if you have a Desktop hooked up to a TV, maybe an older MacMini that can still run Sonoma, you can setup all the widgets like this and have it display all sorts of information all the time. As a matter of fact doesn't this kind of look like the little graphic display that Apple shows during its presentations. Everything in a little rounded rectangle. So this is an interesting way to use a Mac here. Imagine having a MacMini that's in a conference room somewhere and just showing stuff like this while nobody is using it to present. Or if there is a MacMini in your living room that you use to watch a video or use the Apple TV App you can have the Desktop like this so when you're not using it it's useful. 
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “19 Tips For Using Desktop Widgets On Your Mac”

Sheldon

7 months ago

Thanks bunches

Joel

Gary, as always, great video. I find that iPhone widgets are "informative" but not "interactive"on the macOS desktop. For example, theScore iPhone widget on my macOS desktop will provide scores for my favourite teams but selecting different teams, getting news, etc. is a no go, it tells me to open my iPhone (same issue for my iPhone electric car widget). This severely limits iPhone widget functionality on the macOS desktop. Question: Is there a workaround?

Gary Rosenzweig

Joel: I think you just need to tell the maker of that widget to add more functionality to it. You can't change how an app works, the developer must do that.

Gary, appreciated and done!

nick

Gary, I have a Calculator shortcut in my Shortcut app but is not showing up in the Shortcut Widgets list. Any suggestions on diagnosing this? thx

nick: Not sure why it wouldn't be there. Compare the settings for that Shortcut with the settings for other Shortcuts that do show up and see if there is a difference.

Michael

Thanks Gary. I initially thought that desktop widgets were a bit of a novelty feature, but your tutorial has helped make the feature a really helpful addition to my MacBook usage. I particularly like the idea of "storing" widgets in the Control Centre. Regards Michael.

19 Tips For Using Desktop Widgets On Your Mac

Comments: 7 Responses to “19 Tips For Using Desktop Widgets On Your Mac”

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