Chapter  26

Exploring List Widgets

As you learned in Chapter 25, remote views form the core of home screen widgets. A home screen widget is essentially a remote view that is painted on the home screen. A remote view is a view that is entirely disconnected from the underlying data, much like a web page is disconnected from its server.

Collection views such as lists and grids were not part of allowed widgets in the 2.3 release. In release 3.0 they are, allowing for a richer experience on the home screen. Release 3.0 also offers a mini-framework around these collection-based widgets to load and present data asynchronously. There are new classes and methods in 3.0 to support these aspects. As you may know, the 3.0 SDK is optimized and unique for tablets and not available for phones. In 4.0, the APIs of 2.3 and 3.0 are merged to form the same API going forward for both tablets and phones. Although we use the tablet UI in this chapter to demonstrate the concepts, thanks to 4.0, the API is equally applicable to the phone form factor.