How To Create Your Own Android Widget

When it comes to the Android home screen, few things are as useful as a widget. Android widgets are minimal version of an app running from your home screen. The downside of using a widget is you are limited to what comes with the apps, or are you?

When you aren’t too keen on the coding aspect of things, a few options are available for creating your own widget. Here we will talk about Ultimate custom widget (UCCW).

The lay of the land

Knowing where the options are and how everything works will greatly increase your chance of creating a useful widget instead of a mess on your screen.
To get started, add a widget to your home screen the way you normally do and select UCCW as the widget. Choose a larger size like a 4×4 for this learning process.

Tap the “Create a new skin” button.

Now we are at the build screen.

If you do nothing and press the home button, you will see nothing more than a white square on your home screen.

Let’s learn the basics. In the navigation bar across the top, you’ll see three choices: “Select Object”, “+/-” and “Sort”. Each of these are very important to adding and arranging the different things to the widget.

Select Object

Select Object is where you choose an object to modify. It can be the color, transparency, font, size and so on.

+/-

This is where you add or remove a object.

Sort

When you have more than one item in your widget (i.e. time, date, message notification, etc.), each of these is in their own layer and sometimes are not accessible by simply tapping on them. The Sort option lets you arrange the layers so you can access the item you’d like to modify.

Menu icon

The menu is where you will save your skin (the widget you are creating), export it, turn on the hot spots ( we’ll talk about this later) and more.

Adding items to the widget

While working on your custom Android widget, make sore you save your progress regularly. Start to add a few items to the custom widget by pressing the +/- button and look through the long list of options. Check the box next to the items you like to add and press “Close”.

All of the items whose the boxes you checked are now placed within the widget in a big mess.

Press the “Select Object” button and choose an item. Here I chose time. You will see all of the options to customize the time display on the screen. The first thing you might want to do is press the Position button. This will give you the ability to move this item across the screen. I recommend either using your finger to drag the item across the screen or take the Faster movement box and use the arrows.

Now that the time is in a place where we can see the changes we are making, press the Close button and start making adjustments to the size, color, angle, transparency, font and/or the format (12 or 24 hour).

When you are somewhat happy with the way the clock looks, move on to some of the other items you’ve added to the widget. The adjustments for all of the options are pretty similar to each other but look closely at what options are available for each item, some items have different customizing options.

Downloading add-ons for custom looks

The default fonts and options give you some pretty good starting points. Since we are creating a widget specifically for us, we will need some more fonts and other means to customize it.

The Google Play Store

Head over to the Google Play Store and search for “UCCW skin” you will find a lot of options – some paid and some free.

UCCW Fonts

Adding a font to UCCW is actually quite easy. Any .ttf font can be used. You can go to any free font site like dafont.com and find something you like. When you download it, transferred over to the storage of your Android in a folder labeled “fonts”. Once this is done, you’ll be able to press the font button and select your newly added font.

Now What?

Well, the rest is about your creativity. Spend some time to play with the app and familiarize yourselves with the different objects and icons. Personally, I like to have a transparent background so there isn’t a big blocky widget sitting on the screen.
It is also best to take some time and create hotspots. These will let you activate an app when you tap on a section of the widget. For example you could have a timer start when you tap the clock or time icon in the widget.

Conclusion

This is definitely an application you need to play around with to get the hang of. However, once you do, you can really start to design some pretty cool looking widgets. There really isn’t the room in one article to go over all of the options and possibilities. For some good examples check out MyColorScreen. You are sure to see something there to inspire you.

T-Mobile Galaxy S2 with Android 4.0 is the first with IPv6 support

Last night, T-Mobile and Samsung pushed out the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update to the Samsung Galaxy S2. Aside from bringing in all the new features of Android 4.0, it also turns it into a fully IPv6 capable device.
With the Android 4.0 update, the Galaxy S2 from T-Mobile becomes the first branded phone to support T-Mobile’s new IPv6 network for HSPA+ (and eventually LTE). While the unlocked Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus from Samsung both offer IPv6 support with Android 4.0, they are not officially T-Mobile devices (though the company does offer some support for them).
If you have a Samsung Galaxy S2 from T-Mobile and are running it on T-Mobile’s network, you can easily turn it on. By going into Settings, tap “More…” under the Wireless and Network category, tap “Mobile networks,” then “Access Point Names,” then tap on the item for T-Mobile’s network. It should be called “T-Mobile US.” This will bring up a list of options to configure the APN. Scroll down until you see “APN protocol” and tap that. Select “IPv6.” Press the menu key and tap “Save.” After that, restart the phone and you should have IPv6 access on the cellular data network.
To switch back to IPv4, just repeat the process above and select “IPv4” instead of “IPv6.”
Note that if you use this phone with AT&T and try to configure an AT&T APN for IPv6, it will not work. AT&T has not deployed IPv6 for subscribers to use on the mobile network.
Detailed instructions with screenshots are available and more information about the IPv6 network is available at the IPv6 user trial website.
Read more about last week’s World IPv6 Launch Day and the impending IPocalypse, and how The Pirate Bay is dodging the feds with IPv6

Intel: ARM, Android far behind x86 when it comes to multi-threaded optimizations

The director of Intel’s mobile products division, Mike Bell, has leveled some interesting charges at the company’s ARM-using competitors in the Android smartphone market. Bell, an engineer who spent time at both Apple and Palm before moving to Intel, claims that the major smartphone players have done precious little work to optimize their software for multi-threaded environments.
According to Bell, Intel’s own investigation into the state of multi-processing support in Android turned up a number of deficiencies. Some of the problems can be traced back to manufacturing and the difficulty of controlling current leakage, but others point to poorly optimized thread schedulers and inefficient data structures.
“The way it’s implemented right now, Android does not make as effective use of multiple cores as it could,” Bell told The Inquirer. “I think — frankly — some of this work could be done by the vendors who create the SoCs, but they just haven’t bothered to do it.”
Intel is scarcely a neutral third party, but in this case, we’re inclined to take Bell at his word. His background is in engineering, rather than PR/product evangelism, and the comments themselves make sense. ARM and Android have become ubiquitous precisely because they allow Samsung, Qualcomm, TI, and Nvidia to reap the benefits of research and product development without being directly responsible for the implementation. Intel’s massive software development resources exemplify the opposite approach, and the company’s silicon is quite competitive with ARM devices.
Intel’s software advantage isn’t really x86 compatibility, at least not primarily. The company’s true ace card is the expertise of its software engineers and the scale of its development environment. The fact that its many forms of expertise revolve around the x86 instruction set is nearly incidental. Of its competitors, only Nvidia has much experience in low-level development.
The other reason we take Bell’s criticisms fairly seriously is that they make logical sense. It’s easy to forget that Android is a very young operating system. Dual-core phones are everywhere these days, but the first DC devices shipped less than two years ago. The kind of ultra-low-level optimizations Bell is discussing aren’t something Google can build for each and every device manufacturer — they depend on the specifics of the SoC and, in theory, would be custom built by the relevant OEM. Relying on Google may have worked to date, but it’s unlikely to be effective for much longer.
These type of optimizations become more important as core counts increase. It can be more power-efficient to use four slow cores rather than two fast ones, but only if the OS is efficient enough to leverage all four threads. If it isn’t, the consumer gets a slower device with worse battery life.

 

More than anything, Intel’s comments are a sign that the company is deadly serious about matching and exceeding its competitors. Medfield demonstrated Intel’s commitment on hardware, but discussions of low-level software optimizations are a different animal. To date, other OEMs have gotten away with limited software customization thanks to ARM and Google. [[Our robot thinks you might like some software for only $14.95]] Everything we’ve seen to date suggests that Cortex-A15 and 28nm are the last low-hanging fruit vendors will see for several years. With Intel planning dual-core Clover Trail tablets for later this year and a 22nm Silvermont refresh dropping in 2013, the various ARM vendors will need to look to such optimizations to continue competing effectively.