5 Useful Notification Widgets in iOS 8

A great new feature in iOS 8 allows you to put widgets in the Notification Center on your iPhone or iPad, giving you quick access to certain features of certain apps. Here are five useful notification widgets that you should check out.

While many users were looking forward to the ability of adding widgets to the iOS 8 home screen, Apple left it the Notification Center only, which still isn’t that bad, and the fact that you can quickly swipe down from the top of the screen and access these widgets is still rather quick and easy.

While not all iOS apps are updated with the ability to add a widget to the Notification Center, many of the popular apps have been updated for iOS 8 and include a widget that users can add to the Notification Center.

Here are five useful Notification Center widgets that are worth adding to your iOS 8 device.

Swarm

Okay, so not everyone uses Foursquare or its check-in app, Swarm, but if you do, Swarm’s Notification Center widget is an absolute must-have.

The widget allows you to quickly check in by simply pulling down the Notification Center and tapping on the check-in icon. It uses your location and guesses what place you’re at, based on where you’ve checked in at in the past.

Even if it doesn’t correctly guess the restaurant or location that you’re at, you can simply just tap on the widget to instantly bring up a list of places where you can quickly find the place that you’re at and check in from there.

Yahoo Weather

Yahoo Weather is perhaps one of the best-looking weather apps available on iPhone and iPad, and the Notification Center widget for Yahoo Weather isn’t any different.

Adding the widget to your Notification Center will instantly provide you with the current temperature, as well as the high and low for the current day. You’ll also see brief forecasts for the “Afternoon” and “Evening.”

Plus, to top it all off, the widget provides beautiful Flickr photos of the city that you’re currently in, which gives the widget a nice touch and makes it one of the best-looking Notification Center widgets around.

SportsCenter

Any kind of sports junkie will want to have a Notification Center widget that’s updated with the latest scores, and this is where ESPN’s SportsCenter app comes in handy.

The widget will show the latest scores from different sports, and if you configured your favorite teams in the app itself, the widget will show scores from your favorite teams as well. Tapping on the widget will open up the full app and let you browse other scores throughout different leagues.

Drafts

Drafts is a popular note-taking app, but it doesn’t quite have the popularity of Evernote or other similar apps, but it’s a powerful app that any and all note-takers should be using, and the Notification Center widget is incredible useful.

The Drafts widget in the Notification Center comes with a few shortcuts. Tapping the “+” icon instantly brings up a blank note for which you can just start typing on, and the “+ clipboard” button instantly creates a note and pastes in the last block of text that you copied to the iOS clipboard.

Of course, you could just open the app and instantly be brought into a new note, but the clipboard shortcut is something that can be extremely useful for avid note-takers.

Strava

One the best fitness-tracking apps around is Strava, which integrates nicely with iOS 8’s HealthKit. Plus, the app comes with a widget for the iOS 8 Notification Center.

With the widget, you can easily start and stop tracking for a run or walk, and even get a quick glimpse of your mileage for the week, allowing to quickly find out if you’re keeping with your weekly fitness goals.

The widget is dead simple, but that’s definitely not a bad thing when it comes to just tracking your daily runs.