Thursday, May 07, 2009

Android Widget Crazyness

Since my last post I've been Widget'ing away like a good dev, check the Mippin Blog for details of our 'Tech Buzz Widget'

I also wanted to launch a personal widget project as well, so I took a long hard think about what Widgets people really really need and came up with.... wait for it... yes you guessed it... a Battery Widget, doh! Well there wasn't one, so I thought I'd be first at least.

The first incarnation wasn't quite so pretty, but I've got it looking quite nice now. A little 24bit alpha blended glow around the widget helps it blend into any wallpaper. There is also a little charging indicator for the sake of completeness.

If you touch the widget it shows quick links to the Display, Wifi and GPS settings pages. Really this should be replaced with embedded toggles switches to turn GPS/Wifi/Bluetooth/Radio on and off as well as a brightness slider, hopefully I'll get time for that later.

Developing home screen widgets on Android is really enjoyable, so if you have any widget ideas, I may well take you up on them.

By the way, if you are wondering how strong the demand for Widgets on Andorid is right now, the Battery Widget hit 3000 downloads in the first 5 days.