Dashboards You Already Monitor
Home Assistant, Grafana, Pi-hole, Unifi, server status pages. If you self-host anything, you check it. Put the dashboard in a widget instead of bookmarking it in Safari.
Busybody: Reloading Web Widget
Displays websites in a widget on your home screen. Configure a URL, adjust zoom and crop to frame exactly what matters, and glance at current information without opening Safari.
iPhone, iPad, and Mac
Any Website as a Home Screen Widget
Some high-value information only lives on the web with no app to check it. Dashboards. Status pages. Government updates. Air quality maps. Your kid's school lunch menu. You open Safari, type the URL, wait for it to load, glance at the number you care about, and close the tab. Then you do it again an hour later.
Busybody turns any URL into a live widget on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac home screen. Point it at a web page, adjust zoom and crop to frame exactly the part that matters, and place the widget. Busybody captures fresh screenshots periodically so the widget stays current without you lifting a finger.
No account. No subscription. No backend server. Everything runs on your device. Busybody is a website widget for iPhone that lets you glance at the web without opening a browser.
What People Put in Widgets
Status Pages You Refresh During Outages
AWS status, Cloudflare, your ISP, Down Detector. During an outage you do not need an app. You need a glance. A status page widget on your home screen tells you when service is back.
Government and Civic Pages
Permit tracker, school closures, burn ban status, court docket, local meeting agendas. These pages will never get a native app. A government site widget is the next best thing.
Environment and Safety
AirNow AQI, NIFC fire maps, tide charts, USGS river gauge, snow reports. Check air quality before you run. Check the fire map during fire season. A home screen widget beats opening five browser tabs.
Finance and Crypto Trackers
Portfolio dashboards, exchange rate pages, gas fee trackers, DeFi yield monitors. Any financial page you refresh compulsively belongs in a widget where you can glance without context-switching.
Niche Obsessions
Craigslist searches, eBay watch lists, surf reports, trail conditions, concert ticket pages, your kid's school lunch menu. If you check it more than once a day and it does not have its own app, put it in a widget.
How Busybody Works
Add a URL in the app. Busybody loads the page in a real browser engine and captures a screenshot. Adjust the zoom level to get the right scale, then crop to frame exactly the region you care about. A dashboard number, a status indicator, a map, whatever matters.
Place the widget on your home screen. Busybody refreshes the screenshot periodically so the widget stays current. You see the latest state of that web page every time you glance at your phone, without opening Safari or any other browser.
Tap the widget to jump straight into the app and see a larger view. Busybody keeps an archive of captures so you can scroll back and see how a page changed over time. All processing happens on your device. No cloud service, no account, no data leaves your phone.
Why I Built Busybody
I kept a mental list of URLs I checked every day. Air quality on AirNow before a run. The fire map during smoke season. A Grafana dashboard for a side project. My permit status on the county website. None of these had an app, and none of them ever would.
The ritual was always the same: open Safari, type the URL or dig through bookmarks, wait for the page to load, find the one number or status I cared about, then close the tab. Repeat the next morning.
I wanted a widget. Not a bookmark. Not a shortcut that opens Safari. An actual widget that shows a live snapshot of the page right on my home screen. Apple does not build this because their widget system is app-driven, not web-driven. So I built Busybody to fill that gap.
The zoom and crop controls turned out to be the feature that makes it work. Most web pages are cluttered. You care about one number, one chart, one status badge buried in a full page layout. Busybody lets you frame just that piece and put it in a 2x2 widget. That is the whole idea.
Built by Peter. Bootstrapper in Beaverton.