Learn How To Use Notification Center Widgets In macOS Big Sur

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at the new Notification Center widgets in macOS Big Sur.

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So a change in macOS Big Sur is how Notification Center works. You don't have an icon specifically for Notification Center on the right but you can click on the date and time and it will bring it up. Instead of there being two sections, a Today view and a Notifications view, there is just one with Notifications at the top and Widgets at the bottom which used to be in the Today view of Notification Center. We'll look at Notifications in a future video. So I'm just going to dismiss those now and just take a look at the widgets. 

The widgets look very similar to the ones in iOS. They are rectangles with rounded corners and they are each tied to various apps. Here at the beginning they are tied to apps that are built into macOS. Things like Calendar, Stocks, Notes, and Reminders. But the in the future they'll be third party apps that also hook into this widget functionality and provide widgets for you to use here. Now you can edit the widgets that appear here in a variety of ways. Most of those involve going into Edit mode. But you can also rearrange them by just clicking and dragging them even when you're not in Edit mode. Note that when you click on a widget you go into the app for that widget. So, for instance, if I were to click on the Calendar widget here it will launch the Calendar app. If I were to click the Weather widget here it will take me to the Weather.com page since there is no weather app on macOS. 

Now to edit what widgets are shown here and what order they are shown in you can scroll all the way to the bottom and you could see Edit Widgets here. So let's click that and on the left now you'll see a column that has a Search field at the top and various different apps here on the left. In the middle you could see a list of widgets. It will show all widgets if no app is selected. But if I select and app like Clock it will just show the widgets associated with that app. Now to Add a widget all I need to do is drag and drop it into the right side here exactly where I want the widget. In some cases there are various sizes. For instance for World Clock here you could see s and m for small and medium. I could switch to medium and you could see it's a wider rectangle now. I could drag that in. If you go to other apps like Calendar you'll see there's small, medium, and large widgets and sometimes very different functionality within each widget. For instance the small widget just shows today. The medium size widget will show a small calendar and events for today on the left. The large one will show a list with many events including ones that would appear in the future.

Now to remove one of these widgets all you need to do is click and drag it over or you could just click the minus button here and it will remove it. 

Now while I'm in editing mode here I can access more options for some of these. So, for instance, for the World Clock here I can click on it and it will flip over and on the other side I can see the four cities that are represented. So I could drag to change the order or I could click on one and select a new city. But others don't have any. For instance I can click here in Stocks and you can see it's just telling me that this is showing me my Watch List. So I would go into the Stocks app, edit my Watch List, and that's what I would see here. Now you could also change things by Control clicking or using two fingers on the trackpad to click on one of these widgets. So, for instance, for this Stock widget here I can Control click on it and you can see I can Edit it, Remove it, or go into the full Edit widgets mode without have to go to the bottom for that button. So if I Edit stocks here you can see that the small Stock widget has just a single symbol and I can change which symbol is shown. If I Control click here on the Clock you can see I can switch the size here. The same thing with this Weather widget. I can switch the size. So without having to go into Edit mode I can change the size here and go to the small one. Then I could drag it up here and perform all of that without ever having to go into Edit mode.

Let's look at some of the individual widgets here and what they do. We've already looked at Calendar and we know that there's a small, medium, and large widget and they do slightly different things. But note that if you use the large widget and then you click on it here you can select Mirror Calendar app or turn that off and select the exact calendars that you want. So, for instance, if you wanted to create a widget that just showed you the US holidays I can turn off the rest of these and just leave on US holidays. Select Done and now I've got a widget here on the right that just shows me the upcoming US holidays. In Clock there are two different widgets. A City clock and a World clock. City is just a single clock there and you can click on it and then select the specific city. So if I wanted to I could add multiple cities. So I could do Denver and select that and have a Denver clock right here and then I could drag another one and then click that and change that to say New York and just create a whole little array of clocks for places that are important to me. The World clock has a small version with four small clocks in a square or the medium version with four clocks horizontally with a little more information underneath them. Either way you could customize which four clocks are shown. 

Notes has two different widgets. The most useful one is just a plain note which is square widget that shows you information about a single note. So I can click here and select which note I want to show there. Of course there's limited space here for it but at least you could see the first few lines. Then the Folder widget will show a whole folder full of notes. Now if you do just the square it's going to show the first note in that folder. Medium will show a list of notes in there and large will show a list of notes with a little bit of the beginning of each note. Photos only has one widget. It has three sizes but it shows the same thing. It's basically going to show the top memory. So it will change more or less every day showing you a new memory. Hopefully in the future we will have more options like the ability to feature a specific photo or album. Podcast has an Up Next widget with a single podcast. You can have a few shown or a large one and there aren't really any options for these. Reminders allows you to feature a single list in either small, medium, or large modes. So once you put one of these here you can then click on it and select which list you want to feature here. Notice you can use the Smart List as well so you can have a Today, Scheduled, Flagged, or Assigned view there.  So you could potentially put several lists here. Maybe one showing Today, and  another showing a particular To Do list.

There's a ScreenTime widget with small, medium, and large sizes to show you your screen time usage. There are two Stock widgets. One for a single symbol like we have here already but you could also use a Watch List. Small only has room for three stocks there. So does medium. But large will actually give you room for six different stocks. So the six top stocks on your Watch List in the Stocks app. Weather has a widget with three sizes, small, medium and large. There's a lot of functionality in the large one. It will show you the next few hours. It will give you alerts. It will even show you a forecasted precipitation graph here if you're in an area where it's supposed to rain. 

I also should note that in addition to clicking here to bring up widgets you can go to System Preferences and then to Keyboard and then under Shortcuts, Mission Control, there's Show Notification Center. You can turn that on and assign a Keyboard Shortcut to bring it up. You also can go in trackpad to More Gestures and you have Notification Center. If you turn that on you can swipe left from the right edge with two fingers to bring up Notification Center. 

So the new widgets could be very useful for a lot of people and in the future, hopefully, they'll get even better as more widgets are added for the default apps and third party apps begin to use them as well.