Introduction
Nice to have you with us again for another episode of Digital 4 Productivity and today a small but, in my opinion, very fine tip on the subject of the iPhone.
Something that very few of you have probably actively used so far are the widgets. You can access these widgets on one side by swiping from the left to the right on the iPhone home screen. Then the widgets that you see there appear and then there is Edit at the bottom.
And one widget that I can highly recommend, if you go to Process, you can add widgets here with the plus sign in the top left-hand corner, is the battery widget. The battery widget has the charm for you that you can always see how much your Airpods are charged, for example, if you also have other Bluetooth devices connected there, be it other headphones or Bluetooth speakers, for example. So you can always see what the battery level is. You can also see how much power is left in the AppleWatch. Of course, it’s exactly the same with the iPad. So I find this battery widget theme extremely practical. Incidentally, you can always take this opportunity to go to Settings and then Battery. And under Battery there is a tick at the top for Battery charge in percent. You will then always see the percentage of your iPhone / iPad battery charge at the top right. But in addition to this, this budget is quite good. But what you can do beyond that, and this is the main idea of this podcast episode, what you can do if you just tap and hold on one of your screens and then you can also go to Plus at the top left. That’s where the widgets go and the one that I highly recommend you do is the Siri related recommendations. And if you press on it, there are the stacks, the clock then depending on which application you have, and there is then, among other things, the topic of Siri suggestions.
Set up Siri suggestions
And if you go to Siri suggestions, then I would go straight to the first suggestion on the iPad. There you have two rows of A4 icons are 8 icons and you can put that on any screen. And what I did, I put this widget with the Siri suggestions three times on the second screen of my iPhone. So what’s the idea? When I’m there on the first page of my iPhone, I have arranged myself, the app that I use regularly. On the second page, I have nothing but three times practically this Siri widget. And the cool thing is that this Siri widget is so smart that it practically always displays the application that you last opened and that you really need at that moment. And against this background, especially if you have several or many pages, many applications on your iPhone, it is totally ingenious to set up the first page so that you always have the most important applications to hand, especially in the car, whenever you have Apple Carplay, your navigation system, I use TomTom Go for example. That is always fixed. Especially in the car, I always find it important that this doesn’t always change. That’s why I wouldn’t put the widgets on the first page – but on the second page. You can always tell by the fact that the lettering there is not white but black, otherwise it looks exactly the same. And the bottom bar is always finished. And then on the third, fourth page, I always have the things that I have. And on the last page you have the app library, which is sorted by… by categories that Apple considers useful.
Incidentally, you can also do this on the iPad. My experience is only that on the iPad I have the widgets on the first page. I have the Siri suggestion widget on there twice. My idea was to put it on three times so that you always have the top line with it. In my case, it’s just that it only ever fills two of these widgets. For the third one on the iPad, it always says I have no suggestions. On the iPhone, it always fills three widgets for me.
Conclusion
So just give it a try. So perhaps this is a little tip on how you can access applications on the iPhone that you need more frequently more quickly using the Siri suggestions widget.
Yours, Thorsten Jekel
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