Mobility Digest » Widgets

Android Sense Style Widget Stepping Over The Line?

Doug Smith — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:16:33 +0000

There is not doubt that HTC Sense loaded on the current Google Android Devices are making a really big hit with end users. But as we all know, HTC Sense runs a little on the “Heavy” side and some folks may not want to run it. If that is the case then you could still take advantage of a Sense styled clock widget that is the spitting image of that found on HTC Sense. Pretty cool you say? That is what I thought too when I saw it. But there appears to be more to it than that and some people are mad that Google would include a widget like this with their Stock ROMS and even on the FROYO ROMS. Is this a slap in the Face to HTC? You can download this for free so it isn’t like Google is making any money on it. But does the great relationship between Google Android and HTC Give them the right to “Rip Off” a very popular clock design made famous by HTC? Honestly, I have seen other clocks that look similar, but this widget not only looks similar, but has a lot, if not all of the same functionality of the HTC Sense Widget.

So what do you think? Me, I think HTC groans a little over it but nothing gets said. Will it hurt HTC? No. It may even be that this is a great advertisement for Sense. In any case, Google and HTC have a great partnership right now and I don’t think this will get much traction beyond the weekend blogosphere.

Source: Android Central

Google Buzz widget for Android

Matt Chapman — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:26:23 +0000

Post buzz from your home screen! * Quickly post buzz publicly or privately * Add photos to your post from the camera or gallery * Share your location or place * Quickly access buzz.google.com

Post buzz directly from the home screen.
Take pictures to attach to your post. Or just pick one from Gallery.

Download: Search Marketplace for Google Buzz Widget

How To Make a WM 6.5 Widget

David K — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:49:10 +0000

Ok, so this morning we released 50 widgets so let’s talk for a minute about how to make your own custom widgets. I’m going to start with the widgets that we provided. As I said, these are amongst the easiest widgets to produce and I mean that. I don’t know a thing about code and you don’t have to either. Here’s what you need to do:

1) Take any widget from the widget package and change the extension to zip and unzip its contents. Inside you’ll see three files: config.xml, widget.htm and icon.png.

2) Take config.xml and open it using Notepad. All you need to do now is change the lines to suit your needs.

3) Take widget.htm and open it using Notepad and change the lines there are well. Obviously, pick the site you want to direct it to carefully – if you want 36 hour weather to be the default then start at that page (like I did:))

4) Take the picture you want to use as your icon and it should be named icon.png (and obviously in png format) and should be in a size ranging from 64×64 and 100×100 (if it gets much larger the widget grows too large and there’s no advantage to that size; it will also lead to instability of your programs directory as we found out:))

5) Take those three files and zip them and rename the .zip extension to .wgt

And there you have it, you made a widget! See, I told you it was easy:) This code came from hrhnick who followed the Windows Mobile Team Blog.

Now I keep saying that these are simple widgets and that’s accurate. If you unzip the preinstalled WM 6.5 widgets or even the widget created by themuzz (his streaming widget) you’ll see that he has the same xml, htm and png files except he also has javascript. This is obviously a more advanced widget and this is where developers come in. There’s a Windows Mobile Developers Center guide to creating widgets and the standardizations are found here as well. I’m sure in no time we’ll have a ton of the ‘simple’ widgets which I still think are pretty useful but hopefully some more refined widgets can also be developed. Anyone want to do it? I hope so:)

And we know that some people are asking for a small change to the ‘simple‘ widgets- the ability to zoom in. And we hope to have a solution shortly. Of course, if anyone wants to share the answer now (hint WMDev Team we know you’re watching:) please do. We’ll obviously share our findings as soon as we have positive results.

WM 6.5 WIDGET MANIA

David K — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:18:16 +0000

You probably remember when themuzz released his streaming widget which was the first third party widget and then hrhnick released his MySpace widget as only the second third party widget. Both times we hoped that developers would extract the contents of the widgets to understand how they work and then use that to make their own widgets…and that didn’t happen. So we stepped in and we’re providing 50 Widgets today! So this can be your programs list:)

These are not complex widgets. In fact, they’re among the most simplistic widgets that can be made but they do provide a ‘chromeless’ experience that have the feel of apps (and they install like apps). They do require an internet connection when in use (since they are grabbing data from the web) but I think the end experience is still a good one. If you enter your information it is remembered so on the weather widget, for example, it will remember your location. And more than anything, the goal is to bring widgets to the attention of more developers so more complex widgets can start to be released.

Enough background, let’s get to the widgets:

Just to keep some order to 50 widgets let’s start with our own websites:

Mobility Digest Forums

Herg’’s Corner – where Herg shares his latest creations.

OK, now let’s move on to websites that are the work of our staff, contributors and super close friends:)

Alright, we’re getting somewhere now:) Let’s move on to a bunch of our friends. The goal was to help the WM community so we invited the Windows Mobile community and here are some widgets we created for a lot of the sites that we share content with (oh and we did reach out to a lot of other sites that are also our friends, but they didn’t respond – the invites are still open to anyone who wants a widget though). Let’s do this in alphabetical order:

1800PocketPC

Freeware PocketPC

Herm’s Software (you know, the guy that’s been developing everything lately:))

NRGz Twitter (you’re probably using his ROM now…hey look at what he Tweeted)

the::unwired

Tracy and Matt’s Blog

WMPowerUser

Time to rock and roll now. The rest of the widgets belong to sites that have nice mobile websites and are useful in daily life. They range from news sites, to entertainment sites…well you can see for yourself:)

Astrology (MSN’s mobile page)

CalcNexus (filled with mobile calculators ranging from financial, tip, health, currency, financial, loans, etc)

CareerBuilder

CNN

Craigslist

DrinkBoy (mobile site with some drink recipes)

EarthComber (location aware app for food, movies, entertainment, etc)

Edmunds (cars)

FlightStats (airplane status)

Fox News

Friendster

Gas Buddy (find gas prices)

HopStop (mass transit guide for big cities)

NYTimes

People

Please Fix the iPhone (know your enemies weaknesses:))

Price Grabber

SeamlessWeb (order delivery food for major cities online)

The Onion

TV Guide

Twitter

Weather Channel (I defaulted it to 36 hour view)

Wikipedia

YouTube

Zagat

OK, not bad for a day’s work:) We’ll get into how to make widgets later (sorry, getting through 50 of these things is really a killer). For now, get to downloading and we hope you enjoy them. Thanks of course to the sites on the top portions that are our friends and family and provided icons to use, to themuzz and hrhnick for setting the stage (and hrhnick for his guidance), bluemetalaxe (I used a few of his icons cause they’re sick), Mobile Matt for testing and creation and of course to Anudeep for testing all of these and providing the screenshots.

Remember, this is only for people who are already using WM 6.5 (or if you want to be really prepared for the official release this can be your starting point:)). There’s a cab in the download that you will need to install prior to installing the widgets and once installed you should have no problems installing widgets just like apps. The download is only 650k and includes all of the widgets but you can chose which ones to install.

DOWNLOAD HERE

MySpace Widget (6.5) Available

David K — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:47:48 +0000

In what’s only the second third party widget (following the Streaming Widget from Themuzz) XDA member hrhnick has released a MySpace Widget for WM 6.5. There are installation instructions in his posting and we recommend using Themuzz’s solution that he notes in his post as it makes widget installation easier. Here’s a look at it in action:

Great work hrhnick. The flood gates aren’t open, but development of widgets is in progress and that’s a good thing for all of us.

WM 6.5 Streaming Widget

David K — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:41:17 +0000

For those of you using WM 6.5 you should have a few widgets that came included in the ROM. But what’s been missing is custom widgets…until now. XDA member Themuzz has released a WM 6.5 Widget for streaming media. The widget gets its feed from todaypda and it includes 7883 radio stream, 3252 television stream and 59 different countries and the widget will continue to update itself based on the website’s expansion. Aside from being a publicly released widget (possibly the first) it also serves as a good guide on how to make a widget since you can ‘unzip’ the .wgt file to view its contents so this may open the floodgates for a lot more widgets.

The cab and installation instructions are located here. And remember, if you’re not using WM 6.5 then this will not work for you – this is only for those of you using a cooked ROM. Good work themuzz- I like where this is headed.

Widget… or is it little application?

James Schneider — Wed, 13 May 2009 20:28:06 +0000

You know I’m not that PC (Politically Correct not to be confused with a certain company’s ad campaign) so I don’t know the correct term to use for this post. However, I made a stop to a familiar site for some of us Mobile phone junkie’s for a few nice widgets; all thanks to our very own DavidK for the find.

What are widgets you ask? Well widgets are basically a stripped down version of the Pocket Internet Explorer application that is running a mobile version of a web site. Now what widgets are there available you ask?

Well currently there are widgets for:

MySpace

Facebook

Gmail

Directv

Twitter

SMS (Texting for us in the US)

and Wiki

This is all brought to you by emaster101 at PPCGeeks. It’s a great idea if you want one button access to certain mobile sites. This way you don’t have to fumble through your favorites folders for the sites that you frequent a lot like Facebook cough cough Doug!