Widgetsoid for Android meets most of your widget needs
One of the great things about using Android is the ability to add widgets to any of your homescreens. The beauty of widgets is that they have many different functions, and allow you to do things in one click or one quick view instead of many clicks to open different menus or apps. Clock and weather widgets are two of the more popular widgets that most people use, but the one I’m going to be talking about today is different. That app is called Widgetsoid.
Widgetsoid is not an app in the sense that you can open it to do something with it. In order to use it, you have to add a widget to your homescreen. Widgetsoid comes with 12 different widgets to choose from. These fall in four categories: Clock, Indicator, Mixed, and Switcher. Clock is pretty self explanatory, it puts a simple clock with date and time in the widget. Indicator allows you to choose either WiFi, Network, WiFi/Network, or Battery indicator widget. The indicator widget show whether you are connected to a network or what your battery level is depending on which one you choose. The third type is the Mixed widget. This one has the clock in the middle and then allows you to choose two of the other four indicators to put to the left and right of the clock. By tapping on the indicator it will take you to a page that corresponds with that indicator. Touching the clock will open your alarm clock app, the date will open your calendar, the WiFi/Network indicator will open your network settings, and the battery will open your battery stats.
That brings us to our fourth type of widget available. This type is by far the most useful, and has the most options, so many that I won’t go into all of them for fear of running out of room! This is the Switcher widget. I said that there are twelve different widgets available, and nine of them are different sizes of switcher widgets. You can have a widget that is anywhere from 1×5 to 5×1 and all the stops in between. Just because you have a widget that is 4×1 for example doesn’t mean you can only put four switches on it, you are allowed to put up to ten different buttons on each widget that is at least four spaces wide. You can put eight on the three space widget and six on the two space widget. You’ll want to be careful putting too many buttons on one widget, because the more you put, the smaller they are and the harder they will be to use. If you are using a launcher that allows you to stretch widgets like ADW Launcher for example, then you can put the maximum buttons on a switcher and stretch it to fit your screen.
Now let’s get into the the different buttons you can add to your widget. I mentioned earlier that there are too many to list and at last count there was over 40 different pre-loaded buttons you can choose from, plus the ability to add app shortcuts, contacts, bookmarks, and tasks means that the number of buttons and widget combinations is pretty limitless. The switcher buttons come in five categories: network, screen, sound, other, and shortcut. You can see in the pic below the lists of the four main categories.
Once you select what buttons you want to add to your widget, you can then choose to change some of the options on how the widget looks in the Theme tab and in the advanced tab you will finds some options to make the widget directly modifiable, invisible, and you can also name your widgets. In the Profile tab you can save and load your profiles. Once you are satisfied with the preview of the widget at the top of the screen, you can hit the apply button to save your widget. A box will pop up and ask if you want to edit the global preferences. You don’t need to edit them if you don’t want to. The global preferences will affect certain buttons you use. For example, you can set the brightness modes if you use add the brightness button, or if you use the screen timeout button you can set what options you have available.
In the title I said that this widget will meet most of your needs. One major widget that this one does not have is anything to do with the weather. Now this doesn’t bother me in the slightest because I have enough other apps and widgets to tell me what the weather is going to be like. If you haven’t explored all the great possibilities with widgets, I recommend you start with Widgetsoid and find out that the sky is the limit!
[Widgetsoid]
