Sahand Nayebaziz
Everyone loves widgets. They’re beautiful, bite-sized designs that inform, entertain, remind, and inspire. Widgets debuted on the Home Screen with the release of iOS 14 and have been a central part of the modern Apple Design aesthetic. Widgets exploded in popularity thanks to Widgetsmith and other apps that allow anyone to customize new widgets for themselves. Meanwhile, designers have been designing widgets in DetailsPro for years. But, never with this level of utility, practicality, and fun. Today, we’re announcing a new feature that makes designing beautiful widgets with SwiftUI easier and faster than ever before: adding widget designs directly to your Home Screen from DetailsPro.
What’s the big deal? You’re already able to see designs rendered live in DetailsPro’s editor. So, who cares? Well, Apple OS’s have a way of treating every special situation differently, from device to device, different text accessibility settings, Dark Mode, and so on. You can’t finish a real design of a widget until you’ve tested it on your device as the real thing.
This used to mean opening up Xcode, adding a WidgetKit target, and getting to work. Even with AI helping you write code, this still requires a Mac, plenty of time, and plenty of debugging. Enter DetailsPro. This app runs on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and you can create a widget and then have that widget on your Home Screen in seconds. No code, sure. But also no configuration, no typing, super fast changes when you’re ready to tweak the design, no wasted time. Just like that, you’ve designed the V5 and V6 of your widget before others have got their Xcode project building.
This new feature is super easy to use. All you have to do is create a design with a widget-sized template. We already have Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large built-in.
Once you make the design, you can return to your Home Screen and add a new DetailsPro widget. Then, pick from any of your widget designs which have automatically been filtered.
It’s also easier now to find your widget designs. Simply open the new Widgets tab in the tab bar. Any of your designs that contain widgets instantly appear. (Pro tip: if you create a new file from this screen, it’ll automatically be created with every widget size added 🤫)
We’ve also debuted the first of our new monthly template packs in DetailsPro that will keep you with fresh inspiration and design templates to kickstart your next idea. April ’25: Art Collection features a set of widget templates based on the art of Claude Monet. We are big francophiles at DetailsPro and have been blessed to be able to see Water Lilies in person. Some of the templates in each template pack are free and others are available with DetailsPro Premium.
This marks the first of a new kind of design in DetailsPro we are calling Smart Designs. These are regular SwiftUI design files like you’ve been able to make in DetailsPro for years, but now they have new capabilities built right in. In the future, you’ll be seeing more Smart Designs like this come from DetailsPro, but for now, let’s focus on widgets.
You can get started today with version 5.4.0 of DetailsPro.
