I really like my new Sonoma desktop widgets! But you know what? I want MORE. More third party widgets of course. But also, how about a simple text widget? Or even better, a shell script widget? I still use GeekTool for putting a few things on my desktop: a fuzzy text clock, a random quote, etc. GeekTool is getting very old and decrepit and I would love to replace it with new Sonoma widgets. Anyone else that would like to see this? It would be magic, right? 
3 Likes
One thing great about Sonoma widgets is that it also knows about the widget apps from your mobile device. And there are quite a lot of apps that would provide or allow you to design widgets to fill your needs. Notable ones are Scriptable, WdigetSmith & Widgy among others.
That is, if you own an iPhone or iPad.
Thanks for the suggestion, supermamon! Aha, I just tried a WidgetSmith text widget and it works fine. I don’t think an iPhone widget can run an AppleScript on my Mac and then display the output in the widget, though, so I still have yearnings. (I wish I could learn javascript; I don’t think I have the brains for it. So I am mostly limited to AppleScript. 
)
@jessibird do you want the text widget to have instant data, or just fairly recent data?
I’m thinking you could do something like automate a shortcut or macro (Shortery, Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro, etc) on the Mac that puts the required text into something like an iCloud Drive file, or Data Jar. Then the iPhone could grab that data (which will have been synced in the meantime via iCloud) and generate the widget, which the Mac displays on the desktop.
Lots of similar ways this can be achieved but I think you get the idea.
Sorry for the reply delay…that is an interesting idea. It seems a bit silly in a way to store data from the Mac in the cloud and then have to fetch it again, but it might be a way to work around my lack of javascript knowledge. Thanks!
To my surprise, I noticed today that BetterTouchTool has widgets now, or at least it is going to have them, but the documentation mentions it with a big “Work in progress” caveat and it seems to be tied to the “floating menu” feature which I don’t really grok very well.
2 Likes
Very exciting! I hope it comes to fruition!
Weirdly though you can’t seem to:
- See the iPhone batter charge (but yes for other devices) when its nearby.
- Get the fitness or health Apple widgets from iPhone.
Ohh nice find. I love BTT and curious to see how they’re using widgets.
From BTT’s site 
I hope to finally upgrade to Sonoma this weekend and I think I love the idea of widgets. The only concern I have is if it somehow deviates my focus. But I like the concept of not having to open various apps to see some valuable content.
And I don’t use BTT but have access through it via Setapp. Curious where that may be used.
2 months later, does anyone want to share your favorite widgets?
How the heck can the stock Mail app not have a Sonoma desktop widget? And Spark only shows the iPhone widget. Aggravating.
If you do learn JavaScript you can use Scriptable to create your own widgets.
I recently used it to create a build monitor widget that displays the status of the last build of several branches in our software repository.