Dave, I need to track news for the sports team I work with on a daily basis and am wondering if there’s a way to just drop a widget onto my iMac desktop to simplify things? Right now I just keep going to Google Alerts…
Apple reintroduced widgets into the MacOS experience a couple of years ago, but they haven’t gotten much press or visibility, nor do I see that people are using them. This is too bad, actually, because they’re great and offer neat solutions to many questions people have throughout their day. What’s the weather at grandma’s house? What time is it in Beijing? How’s the stock market doing? All of those can be permanently sitting on your desktop, updated regularly, without any fuss or hassle!
One of my favorite widgets is tied to Apple News precisely because it’s so extraordinarily customizable. You can track just about any news topic that’s in the app database, and it sits on your Desktop, white on grey and very low-key while you’re working on other apps. Go back to the Finder and it jumps out as black on white, making it much easier to see what’s new. You want to track your sports team, I need to track developments and news in Artificial Intelligence. Let’s see how I set that up on my MacBook Pro…
ADDING WIDGETS TO YOUR MAC DESKTOP
The fastest and easiest way to add a new widget to your Desktop – even if it’s the very first – is to simply Control-click on a blank spot on the Desktop. A context menu appears:
As highlighted, choose “Edit Widgets…” to proceed. A big window appears on the lower portion of the screen:
Notice the categories of widget down the left side. I’ve already clicked on “News” since I know that’s what I want to add, but if this is your first time in Widgetland, I encourage you to peruse some of the other options too.
With Apple News widgets, there are two options; “Today” and “Topic”, the former being top news and the latter being just a single topic that you specify. You can scroll down just a smidge to see the size options:
You can change size once you add a widget, so don’t stress too much about which size you pick. I’ll go for the middle size. To add it, simply drag it off this window onto the spot you prefer on your Desktop. For me, that’ll be the top left corner:
The default topic is “Science” but that’s something you can change.
CUSTOMIZING A MAC NEWS WIDGET
If you’re still in Edit mode, simply click on the widget face and it’ll switch to its own settings:
Click on “Science” to change it. Then you can type in your team name, topic, theme, or even a company name or celebrity:
I’ll click on “Artificial Intelligence” and it instantly flips around and shows me the top stories that match the AI category:
Easy enough. Done.
HOW TO READ STORIES FROM THE NEWS WIDGET
If any of the stories in the widget now catch your eye, simply click on them and you’ll launch Apple News with that story on its own page:
That’s a pretty slick way to keep up on the news, isn’t it? But we’re not quite done. Control-click on the widget and a different menu appears:
As I said earlier, you can see it’s really easy to change the size of the widget as desired, remove it if it’s not working for you, edit your topic, or go back to the overall widget editor. Otherwise, when your focus is a different app than the Finder, check out what happens:
Notice how it’s turned grey in the top left (that’s “Large” size, by the way), and all the color’s been leeched out of the images to have it not be too distracting. An excellent implementation overall. Hope that it helps you with your own subject tracking too.
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about MacOS since the first release and have hundreds of helpful tutorials here on the site. Please check out my Mac help library for lots more useful content while you’re here!