Tag Archives: Widget

Overlays Turns Any Android Widget Into A Persistent, Floating Panel

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Just when you thought apps that could be run as overlays – such as Tiny Apps, Floating Browser Flux! and Super Video – were all the rage, Overlays for Android comes along with an offering that further builds on the concept. Overlays works with widgets, not apps, allowing you to use the widget of any app anywhere in the OS, all neatly managed through a robust profile system. Widgets can be resized and repoistioned freely, that is, they do not snap to a grid while you do so. Even better, you can do all this after the floating widget has been set and you are running your priority app. For a more closer look at what could be a step in the evolution of Android widgets, read on after the break. Read More

Get Real-Time Notifications On Android Lock Screen With This Widget

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Android's notification system is great for staying informed about all your phone and app activities and updates from anywhere in the OS, but what if you want to access this information without having to unlock your phone's screen?  Notification LockScreen Widget allows you to do just that! We have seen the likes of DashClock widget bring a lot of extra functionality to the lock screen, but the AnyDash notifications extension for the widget only offered setting up notifications for selective apps, and had its own styling. Notifications Widget places real-time notifications of everything from your Notification Drawer into a very neat widget, complete with a handful of very useful customizable features. Read More

Add Custom Extensions To DashClock Lock Screen Widget For Android

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Recently, we wrote about DashClock Widget - the brainchild of leading Google team member Roman Nurik - and the widget has already proved to be one of the most impressive and widely acknowledged Android app releases of the year. DashClock Widget basically looks to exploit true potential of Android lockscreen widgets announced in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean by presenting users with a plethora of information and notifications pertaining to various apps on the very same screen, which would otherwise mostly be accessed only by unlocking the device and navigating to the relevant apps. The widget’s own dedicated extensions aside, it’s the extensible nature of DashClock Widget that has done it a world of good. Almost every other day, a brand new third-party extension for the widget hits the Play Store, introducing us to yet another one of the countless possibilities offered by this simple little widget. Dashclock Custom Extension by Dominik Gross is one of the most interesting extensions we've seen for the widget so far. It lets you add a few customizable extensions to the widget that you can personalize according to your needs, complete with various user-defined actions. Read More

DashClock Is A Multi-Purpose Android Lock Screen Widget With Support For Add-ons

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Ever since their introduction in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, lock screen widgets have been lauded and loathed almost equally by Android users from all across the globe. While some cite the feature as an easy means for intruders to access your personal information, others relish the convenience with which they’re able to take a peek at crucial information without having to unlock their devices. If you’re one of the supporters of lockscreen widgets, we might have found an ideal replacement of the stock clock widget for you in DashClock. Developed by one of the leading design engineers of the Android team, Roman Nurik, DashClock is a neatly-designed and customizable Android clock widget capable of displaying a wealth of additional information right on your device’s home and lock screens. Let's find out all about this handy widget after the jump. Read More

Notifications Widget Displays All Alerts On Android Home & Lock Screen

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Developed by XDA member Roymam, Notifications Widget is a customizable widget for Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich and higher devices that replicates the looks and functionality of dismissible notifications introduced in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and later iterations. Using the widget, you can view and interact with all the notifications that show up in your Android device’s notification shade. Be it a notification regarding a missed call or a new SMS/email, update alerts from Play Store, a Gtalk message, or any third-party app notification for that matter, Notifications Widget is capable of displaying them all on a compact home screen widget. If you have an Android 4.2 Jelly Bean or higher device, you can install Notification Widget to your device’s lockscreen to take a peek at all your latest notifications without having to unlock the device. In addition, the widget lets you directly launch relevant apps and dismiss all notifications at once with a mere tap. Read More

Google Sound Search Song Recognition Widget Comes To Play Store

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The official mobile clients of various cross-platform online music recognition services like Shazam and SoundHound are hugely popular for the level of ease they offer to identify and track information regarding any music you come across, be it anywhere. Inspired by the success of these tools, Google decided to incorporate one of its own within Android 4.1 Jelly Bean in the form of a neat little home screen widget. Call it a Christmas gift or Google’s decision to spread the feature to masses, the same Sound Search widget is now available in the Play Store for any device running Android 4.0 or higher. As with Shazam and SoundHound, the idea behind this widget is the same - to help users easily recognize any playing song. In addition, you can also purchase the detected songs from Google Play’s gigantic online music repository. Read More

Live Image Widget Cycles Through Photos From The Web On Android Home & Lock Screen

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Live Image Widget is a customizable home & lock screen widget for Android capable of displaying and automatically circling web-based images from various user-specified URLs. By automatically updating photographic content from your preferred URLs, CCTV devices and / or webcams at specific intervals, the widget helps you instantly preview pictures from required online sources. This can be especially useful where the images are dynamically updated at the target URL. You may place multiple widgets on your home screen and view any image in full screen mode with zooming option. Moreover, you can manually refresh the widget's content, switch between different images, and even save the current photo to your device. There is even more to Live Image Widget; keep on reading to find out. Read More

GramWidget Is An Awesome Instagram Widget For Android Home & Lock Screen

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Since the official Android app of the popular social photo-sharing wonder Instagram doesn’t (yet) support a dedicated widget, most avid users have to rely on a third-party offering to take a glance at the various activities taking place on the network from their home screens. In this regard, we have already reviewed an elegant solution by the name of BlinxBox that impressed us greatly with its overall features. However, with the widget no longer available in the market anymore, it’s a great opportunity for the developers community to offer a viable alternative. That’s exactly what the developer of GramWidget has done! Just like BlinxBox, GramWidget is a third-party Instagram Android widget capable of circling your favorite photo content from the service on your home screen. Users on Android 4.2 or higher also get the option to set GramWidget, complete with Instagram’s picture-filled goodness, on their devices’ lockscreens to enjoy an unending stream of high quality photos from their Instagram account. Read More

Add Weather Clock Widgets To Android 4.2 Jelly Bean Lock Screen

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Well, that didn’t take long! It’s barely been a couple of days since we explored in detail the brand new customizable Android 4.2 Jelly Bean lockscreen with support for widgets & multiple screens, and we already have come across our first third-party lockscreen widgets. Beautiful Clock Widgets is a comprehensive suite of several gorgeous Android clock and weather home screen widgets, with support for being placed on the Android 4.2 lockscreen. There are dozens of snazzy alternatives to pick from, all coming in multiple sizes. Users with older Android versions need not be envious, since they can still add these to their home screens. Each widget on offer is customizable in one way or the other, and can be set to depict time & weather of user-selected location and preferences. Read More

Search For Cydia Tweaks From Within iPhone’s Notification Center

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At times, jailbreak users just have to wonder that how anyone can survive on iOS without access to the Cydia store. Cydia tweaks, apps and themes play an important role in the lives of countless people who own jailbroken iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Although there is a lot of quality content available in the jailbreak store, this is not the only factor that makes Cydia so useful for such a diverse range of users. It’s the sheer number of items present in the Cydia store that ensures there is always something there for everyone. The jailbreak store does have its fair share of annoying nuisances, like the fact that you have to wait for it to refresh every time it is launched, but overall, people tend to love it. Although Cydia provides its users with so many useful tweaks, when you come to think of it, there aren’t too many of them that enhance the store itself in any way. This is what makes Cydia-SearchNC a noteworthy release. This Notification Center widget will let you search the jailbreak store right from within the NC on your iPhone! Read More

Now Playing For NC: Control & Tweet Music From iOS Notification Center

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The stock Music app in iPhone and iPad is something that Apple has got absolutely right. It does not have too many options, which helps in keeping things elegant and simple, and on the other hand, it has all the features that are enough to ensure that most users don’t need any third-party app to play their favorite songs. Music controls are pretty thorough too, and users aren’t restricted to the in-app controls to navigate between tracks, thanks to the presence of these controls on the lockscreen and in the App Switcher tray (not to mention the earphone buttons). Now Playing for Notification Center is a tweak that provides users with yet another option to control their music, adding some pretty cool options of its own to the mix as well. Via this Notification Center widget, you can change tracks, rewind, forward, pause or play them, and there is also the Twitter button in the tweak, using which you will be able to scrobble your music with a single touch. Read More

BlinxBox Is An Elegant Android Home Screen Widget For Instagram

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Who isn’t familiar with the rollercoaster ride of the popular photo editing and sharing wonder, Instagram, on Android. Just hours after its release to the Google Play Store, the highly revered and anticipated app amassed a million downloads; then within a few days of arrival, it surpassed the five million download mark, thereby going on to become the most popular Android app from the social genre. Not to forget, its acquisition by the social networking giant, Facebook, is yet to yield some fruitful outcome. It’s not that the smartphone world wasn’t familiar with the potentials of Instagram before it hit the Play Store – try asking an iOS user for whom Instagram was once the sole reason for showing off rather proudly before ‘other’ mobile users. Having said all that, there is something about the entire package that die-hard Android fanboys are found yearning for, and those with iOS-powered devices can only dream of as of now: a homescreen widget! I mean, how could an app of the caliber of Instagram afford not to offer said feature to, at least, the Android users? While iOS users can hinge on a miracle to get said feature on their devices, it’s time for Android users to rejoice, as BlinxBox is here. Read More

10 Must-Have Free Preference Panes For Mac OS X

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Apps undoubtedly dominate Apple's ecosystem when it comes to getting anything done, and Macs are no exception. However, they are function specific, and many apps that perform simple little functions or act as utilities can be skipped altogether if you know the right Terminal commands. Not to say you won’t ever need to install an app, but apps do what they do and noting more. If you ever decide you need to tweak the whole experience you get from your Mac system, a Preference Pane (or prefpane) will be one of your top choices. The really awesome thing about a third party preference pane is that it works system wide. You won't ever be bothered with a preference pane cluttering your Menu Bar or having to enable it at start up. The following is a list of 10 preference panes you need to have on your system. Read More

MP Task Manager: Android Home Screen Widget That Lets You View & Kill Running Apps

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All the various applications and programs, whether on computers or mobile devices, are meant to help users with reaching effective solutions to the daily routine problems with a relative degree of ease and convenience. That said, keeping too many applications actively running in the background can cause even the most robustly built operating systems to bog down quite adversely. This is where all those task management apps come in handy. Even the Google Play Store now features quite a few quality task management solutions for your Android. While most of these apps come in the form of a comprehensive package, filled with a plethora of various other features too, if you’re looking to avail only the task management feature, and that too, right from your homescreen without having to launch any standalone apps, you must try MP Task Manager Widget. Read More

ClipboardEdit: Edit iPhone Clipboard Text From Notification Center [Cydia]

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There are some tweaks in the Cydia store that might not be useful for all jailbroken iOS users, but might come in handy in specific situations. ClipboardEdit is one such tweak, and is the latest addition to the rather long line of tweaks which appear as Notification Center widgets in your iOS 5-supported iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.  The functionality offered by the NC widget is really simple, and all it does is to allow its users the editing of textual content on the clipboard of their iDevice. If you want to paste the text on multiple locations, and it needs to be changed slightly, then ClipboardEdit is the perfect widget to have. It can also come in handy when you have to paste the copied text to a place which does not support editing or brings up the action menu. Read More

WeeCloseApps: Use An NC Slider To Kill Background Apps [Cydia]

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The task switcher tray is a really useful feature of iOS, as it allows you to navigate among multiple apps at a quick pace. However, its usefulness decreases as the number of apps in it increases. If you have a lot of apps in the task switcher tray, you will have to spend more time looking for the one you actually want to resume using, and that is why it is important to keep the task switcher relatively clean. There are many Cydia tweaks which let you kill background apps in bulk, like the previously covered KillBackground for automatically keeping the App Switcher tray clean, and there are even some Notification Center widgets that serve the purpose like WeeKillBackground. WeeCloseApps is another Notification Center widget which lets you kill background apps, but apart from that, it offers some additional functions as well, and has a refined interface. Read More

MailWidget: View Number Of Unread Messages In Mail App On Dashboard [Mac]

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If you were to name a few things you always want to keep on your screen, they would probably be the time, Wi-Fi status, Mail alerts and the Mayan Calendar so you always know how many days are left until the world ends. While users may add a lot more to this list, this is the bare bone of it. MailWidget is a Dashboard widget for Mac that puts the number of unread messages in Apple Mail on Dashboard. The widget lets you choose which account you would like to view unread messages from (supports only one), and how frequently it should check for new messages. While you will need to configure an email account with Apple Mail, you do not necessarily have to keep it running for the widget to work. Read More

Screenshot Plus Widget: Screen Capturing Dashboard Tool For Mac

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Screenshot apps aren’t hard to come by for any platform - desktop or mobile - and we’ve certainly covered a whole slew of them. Of the many Mac variants that we’ve covered, they all had one thing in common; they were apps. Screenshot Plus Widget is a widget for Mac that rests on your Dashboard, and is as feature rich, if not more, as SnapNDrag. The widget not only does the basic screen, window and area capturing, but also allows you to take a timed screenshot of any desktop space or the Dashboard. It lets you save images in JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF and PDF formats, and lets you choose one of four actions to perform after capturing a screenshot and save it to any location on your hard drive. Read More

TwiStats: Keep Real-Time Track Of Twitter Followers Count From Your Home Screen [Android]

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Smartphones of today have transcended beyond the means to connect you to your contacts through just the cellular network. Instead, these nifty little gadgets are nowadays being used as full fledge socializing tools. Whatever status message you need to post, interesting things that you wish to share with your online buddies, or keep an eye on what is trending on various social networks, your smartphone has you covered. In fact, now we are heading into times where users are able to keep a close tab on their overall activities on their preferred networks, statistically.  TwiStats for Android offers what even the official Twitter client, or numerous other third-party social media aggregators (such as TweetDeck, Seesmic Ping TweetCaster, StreamLife and Social Jogger 2) don't; not yet, at least. Through an elegantly designed homescreen widget, it displays real-time statistics for any Twitter account of your choice. Once the widget is installed on your homescreen, just feed in the desired Twitter username, select the time zone, hit the Get Stats! button, and you're done. Ranging from the total number of followers to an overall count of your daily tweets, and much more in between, the widget packs all the vital statistics pertaining to your Twitter account that you might otherwise be checking from within the official Twitter client, or its website for that matter. Read More

Evernote Updated With Notebook Sharing, Widgets Now Separately Downloadable

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Evernote – the groundbreaking cross-platform note-taking service -  has just updated its official Android client (to v3.3) with a handful of goodies. Apart from several new features that have been added to the Evernote client itself (details later), we now have the Evernote Widget available as a separate app on the Android Market. Using this widget, users can now easily access the core Evernote features right from their homescreens regardless of whether the app itself is installed on your SD card or internal storage. The app itself now supports even better integration with Evernote's drawing app, Skitch. Furthermore, you can now easily share your notebooks on the fly with either your contacts or anyone via public URLs. Read More