If you haven't visited iCloud online recently, today would be a good day to stop by.
Today, Apple has officially rolled out its massive redesign for iCloud on the web. As users will see when they log into the iCloud website, the entire user interface has been refreshed, and a new widget system has taken over the dashboard. The redesign has been available in beta for a few weeks, but the company is now rolling it out to all users.
This starkly contrasts with the old version of iCloud.com, which showed you the available app icons upon login. Choosing one of those apps would, of course, take you into it, but outside of seeing the app icons themselves, the only insight you got into each app on the home screen is a notification dot.
It's all about the web widgets, baby
With the new redesign, Apple has replaced all the individual app icons with a customizable set of widgets. Users can customize their dashboard with widgets for Photos, Mail, Calendar, iCloud Drive, and more. Within each device, Apple will preview your most recent photos, calendar appointments, the newest emails in your inbox, or your most recently used files.
iCloud on the web has always seemed to be an afterthought for Apple as the company tends to focus more on building out iCloud features for its devices. The iCloud experience has historically been faster and more feature-rich on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. I can't honestly remember the last time I used iCloud through my browser.
However, it's good to see that iCloud on the web is still getting some attention from the company. In addition to having it to fall back on if you need to, there must be some subset of users that Apple sees who regularly access the service through their browser.
