What Widgets Do

Widgets are applications that run in the background all the time. If you have a widget on your computer it is probably a clock, a calculator, possibly even an animated fish tank. On your phone they may be a weather service or something that tells you where the lowest gas prices are.

These are useless. Widgets take simple things that need to be done maybe once or twice a day and run them constantly.

The weather service is the worst offender of this. No one needs up to the minute weather information. In fact, the weather app should have the current weather as the smallest bit of information. When people look for weather info they want to know what the weather will be like. This can be accomplished by looking at the weather once in the morning before heading to work.

Weather App running on Android

Why do people think they need widgets always running and taking up battery life? They look cool and they represent the future, where information is always at our fingertips. Hint: that future is already here and it can be accessed through a series of web pages. Maybe it doesn't look like Minority Report, but it's just as useful.