An Apple patented granted yesterday for the company’s original iPhone contains within one of its illustrations a small piece of information that could confirm the company is willing to open up Notification Center widgets in iOS 5 to third-party developers.
The patent generated a lot of buzz when it went public yesterday, due to its broad scope that could mean every other touchscreen smartphone on the planet now infringes one of Apple’s patents. However, there’s an interested piece of information that many of us overlooked.
Within ‘Figure 1A’ of Apple’s new patent, there is an illustration that mentions “User-Created Widget(s)” and a “Widget Creator Module” — two positive indications that Apple will enable the APIs that allow third-party developers to create their own widgets for use in the iOS 5 Notification Center.
By giving third-party developers the go-ahead to create their own application add-ons, we can expect to see widgets for our favorite third-party applications, such as quick access to social network feeds and to-do lists, and controls and information for our music apps.
Developers have already been hard at work creating their own widgets that can already be integrated into Notification Center on jailbroken devices. Just this morning we brought you the WeeTranslate Google Translate widget, and there are plenty of others available in Cydia.
[via RazorianFly]
