Apple may not have added support for Android-style home screen widgets to iOS 5, but the company did add a weather forecast utility and support for stock information to the Notification Center. When you pull down from the top of the screen to view missed calls, messages, or alerts from other applications, you can also check the weather or view the latest market updates. But what if you want to see sports scores, the latest news stories, or other information?

Right now there’s official support for third party developers to build “widgets” that will show up in the Notification Center. But developer Will Homer has figured out how to do it even without Apple’s support. He’s posted the source code for a simple “Hello World” widget, which you can see pictured above.

It should be interesting to see whether Apple eventually adds Notification Center widget creation tools to the Software Developer Kit for iOS 5. I could also see Apple deciding not to make it too easy to hook into the notification area, since it could quickly get littered with third party widgets. While Android users can pick and choose where they want to place widgets on various home screens, the Notification Center in iOS 5 provides a limited amount of space which will be used by widgets and alerts.

via 9 to 5 Mac

Brad Linder

Brad Linder is editor of Liliputing and Mobiputing. He's been tinkering with mobile tech for decades and writing about it since...

4 replies on “Third Party widgets could show up in the iOS 5 notification bar”

  1. Hmm, Im so surprised and excited about the iOS 5 update! The iCloud is so cool, would be a amazing Media and Document storage and player, then maybe I don’t need to do repeating conversion with my iFunia video converter to different device~

  2. Please don’t call them “widgets”. They are not widgets. They are some Apple garbage. They are not dynamic live. You pull down the notification bar and you see a static info. I want dynamic LIVE widgets. When will I get them Apple?? Would I have to want another 4 years for you to copy widgets from Android?

    1. Alright, time for me to chime in. Honestly I take your ignorant cruise as a complete joke. These widgets are only 2 little buttons put into notification center for developers to test. iOS xCode will have a development kit for developers to make their own widgets. For such an ignorant plea as for someone like yourself to blatantly say that this is all Apple will be serving us, is a complete piece of crap served on a bronze platter. ALREADY, in Cydia you can find numerous iOS 5 WIDGETS, that DO STUFF that you are free to install. This means that Notification Center is flexible, and can be edited. Yes, people still jailbreak their devices, just like people root their Android devices because they aren’t happy with those either. But, of tantamount importance, the iOS 5 SDK will include a widget development kit so it won’t be strangled only to those who jailbreak their devices.

      You speak of Apple copying Android, when it is blatantly obvious that they have borrowed from the jailbreak community, NOT Google’s Android operating system. Apple hired jailbreak developers Ryan Petrich and Greg Hughes to implement the new notification system and wifi-synchronization. But I see now that ignorant people like you will continue to give Android credit for widgets, when it was these jailbreak developers that have been developing for the iPhone and other iDevices alike since iOS 1, with the iPhone 1, which came out BEFORE Android. So to put it bluntly, your accusations of Apple stealing from Android is complete horse crap.

      P.S. The weather widget changes upon your weather. Therefore it doesn’t fit within the definition of static. It dynamically changes the information and weather display to match your current location.

  3. hi there my too i have a first gen ipad and a 64 gb ipod touch with ios 5 the ipad has cnbc stock with sticks and ipid touch has widget shows weather and stocks real time i also have ipad mini iphone 6 plus running ios 8 hope there be alot more widgets on ios 5 like on ios 8 becuase i prefre notification widgets over apps

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