Chapter  25

Home Screen Widgets

In this chapter, we will cover Android's home screen widgets in detail. Home screen widgets present frequently changing information on the home screen of Android. From a high-level perspective, home screen widgets are disconnected views (albeit populated with data) that are displayed on the home screen. The data content of these views is updated at regular intervals by background processes.

For example, an e-mail home screen widget might alert you to the number of outstanding e-mails to be read. The widget may just show you the number of e-mails and not the messages themselves. Clicking the e-mail count may then take you to the activity that displays actual e-mails. These could even be external e-mail sources such as Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail, as long as the device has a way to access the counts through HTTP or other connectivity mechanisms.