Gadgetory

hey everybody it's joe from pocketnow.com back when I was a windows mobile guy part I like most about that OS was the today screen specifically the agenda view where I could see all of my upcoming appointments and to-do items right there on the home screen whenever I turned on the phone I could tell at a glance exactly where I was supposed to be what I needed to prepare for next was great when I moved over to Android I really didn't have that because the stock widgets from google just kind of breezed past that and even today they don't do a really great job so what I've done is I've got out and I found a couple suggestions for widgets for you that I think you might like i'll show you what i use and i'll show you some other options so let's go do that now okay so the first thing that we have this is a nexus one with the stock android 2.1 operating system on it it doesn't have HTC Sense UI and it doesn't have a motoblur so you're just going to see the raw stuff that comes from google the first thing to show you is the calendar icon calendar icon simply launches the calendar app that's it in previous versions there was a number 25 on the calendar icon which was kind of confusing if it wasn't the 25th day of the month which today is not it looks kind of nice doesn't have much functionality other than just launching the app so to help give you a little bit more information at a glance Google decided they would also release a widget and they call that widget simply calendar so we'll put that on the home screen first thing to note about this it does show the day of the week it also shows the day of the month it shows your next upcoming appointment what time it is what day it is what the title is and where it's located but it's not all that configurable you can't do to do tasks you can't change the color of this bar you can't make it transparent or translucent it just is stock it does what it's supposed to do and that's all it does is just fine but let's look at something a little bit nicer than that what I'd like to show you first is a free widget right down here called smooth calendar go to the market search for smooth calendar download it install it there you go the first thing you'll note is this is a 1 by 4 widget it's one tile high by four tiles why'd you also have this nice little flip calendar that shows the month and the calendar date doesn't show the day of the week like the last one did but you'll notice on here I've got my next three upcoming appointments shown right there really nice at a glance easy to see if I tap on it it asks me what I want to do configure it launched my calendar or refresh the app so one touch access you know real nice and easy to get into it if I move it down here over the grass you'll see that it's also semi-transparent shows all the animation of your live wallpaper really nicely and hey the price is right it's free it looks really nice it does what it's supposed to do not all that configurable but clean pure and shows a lot more information at a glance if you want configurability however you're going to want to get these guys right down here which are the pure calendar widget and you'll notice you get a whole bunch now these aren't free but they're pretty darn cheap and they're worth every penny I'm not going to tell you the price because prices on the marketplace change all the time but we're talking just a couple bucks at most so coming to look at this and you can pick what size do you want a 2 by 2 2 by 3 all the way down for x 14 x 24 x 3 or a full page 4 by 4 they even have a calendar grid widget which is it's a separate purchase but it shows your entire calendar in a four by four widget in a grid on your screen so it's really nice what I'd like to show you here since I showed you the four by one widget before let's see what they have with their four by one first thing that you'll notice is this gets into an awful lot of configuration but you can tie it to your regular Google Calendar HTC Sense calendar droid exchange calendar yada yada yada yada yada yada I mean there's tons of stuff and this developer is always adding more we're going to stick with the stock regular google calendar and i'm not going to show you all this because honestly i don't have time what I'm going to focus on instead however is right down here which is the continued and skin so we're going to tap that from here it's going to go out grab some data from the internet this will take a little bit of time depending on your connection but basically this is a skinnable widget and he's continually updating the skins for this widget new stuffs come in all the time really you're going to stick with a couple I'm going to go ahead and do this one we're going to tap on that to select it and then we're going to tap on it again a little bit confusing here hit transparency and then we can set the transparency of this via a slider to wherever we want from all the way transparent to opaque I like it somewhere in the 25 range and I'm having a real hard time doing this on camera for you will save and exit and there you go you've got a nice very transparent glass looking calendar widget really cool now the thing that I like about this you can tie in your Google Tasks orgy tasks with it and display those as well but in the same amount of space you've got not only your upcoming appointment but you've also got the day of the week a month the calendar day you've got a configuration button and then a quick ad which just really nice let me come over and show you on my home screen where I've got a four by two widget this shows me the current day my day's appointments appointments on Monday on Tuesday so in just a little teeny bit more space I've got six appointment showing on my screen and its really really worthwhile this is not only appointments but to do tasks as well now I know I'm going to get asked this so I'm just going to answer it right away this widget on the top I feel as indispensable was the very first widget in fact the very first app that I spent money on when i got my android this is called beautiful widgets by levelup studios and it is just that it's gorgeous skinnable as well in this case i've got what's called a naked skin so it doesn't have any background on it it's just entirely transparent nice big clock you can choose from flip clocks to cyanogen clocks to vacuum tube style blocks just really cool stuff shows me again the day of the week the month the calendar day shows me where I am and what the weather is like and yes we have just gone through a whole bunch of thunderstorms current temperatures 52 degrees high of 62 low of 44 that's at a glance what my weather is going to be like tap on that and it brings up an animated screen showing my four day forecast along with a bit more information win relative humidity and whatnot beautiful app it does exactly what it's supposed to do and it does it gorgeously I would highly recommend anybody that wants to get weather information on their phone go ahead and get this it is entirely wonderful so those are the apps that I find or those of the widgets rather than I find most helpful and I would highly recommend going out and spending the money on these if you don't want to spend any money go ahead and try smooth calendar widget out it's free it shows you quite a bit of information really nice but this is the kind of functionality that was missing from Android that I really have gotten used to with windows mobile and with just a couple widgets I've restored all of that functionality and added quite a bit of aesthetics it looks really nice too I think you'd agree I mean this home screen really looks good so I'd be interested to see what you've got on your home screen what widgets you like what widgets you don't like if you think the configuration for smooth or excuse me pure calendar widget is just way too complicated like I do because you've got all that stuff that I didn't even show you so please leave a comment let me know and let's see who's got the best home screen out there for pocketnow.com I'm Joe Levi with today widgets