Gadgetory

hey guys Joe for pocketnow.com and one of the really cool apps that I like and I've had it for a long time is from level up Studios it's called beautiful widgets well I've shown you that before today they released a huge update to it that just adds all kinds of cool stuff they also updated the beautiful live weather wallpaper that you guys have been asking about in almost every comment it looks neat it's really organized let's go take a look okay in most of my videos you guys have seen this big clock widget at the top and you've seen this live wallpaper in the background and it's really I like it a lot I mean this this beautiful today widget it's it's gorgeous has what you need big nice clock in it as the current weather the temperature the expected high and low and the location where you are and of course the the day and date so it's a lot of information packed into one this morning the level up Studios developer released an update and this update is huge I don't know why he just didn't release an entirely new package called beautiful live widgets to order or something I have no idea but it's that different you can see these are the new widget styles in fact let me go ahead and remove this for you so you can see exactly what I'm talking about we're gonna go ahead and add a widget this is going to be in the beautiful widgets pack and it is called beautiful super clock alright you got that so we're gonna go ahead and put on the beautiful super clock 4x2 because that's what we had on there before it's going to ask us to go through and configure it now this is just a stock configuration one thing that's been added you can change your feature from the weather to the battery if you want a battery indicator so that's really kind of nice I've got a little battery indicator up there that says Joey you've done too much surfing and reading today already and your battery is low but we'll forgive that for now one about the old beautiful widgets is the the configuration just kept bigger and bigger and bigger and longer and longer and longer well in this iteration in the new widgets not the old ones the old ones stayed the same which is kind of nice for compatibility there's a new organization scheme so it's got this tab based organization where you can set your general stuff you can set your clock settings whether you want to use the short date format or the 24 hour format I'm partial to 24 hour coming here to weather you can choose your weather service either AccuWeather or Google set your location you can either specify a location or set it to geolocation geo locations what I've done set your update interval of course how how current do you want your weather to be and how much battery do you want to suck down to get that information and keep it up-to-date I've got mine set for an hour of course you can set it to longer and shorter than that or refresh on awake it's going to refresh the weather as soon as you power up your device well since I power on/off power on quite often I don't want all that extra data going across so I've unchecked that button 1 use Celsius or metric rather than Fahrenheit I can do that if I want to get temperature notifications up here in the bar I can do that and just lots of stuff that you can do so I like it quite a bit I'm gonna skip appearance for a minute go over to advanced in advanced you can set what happens when you touch various parts of the the widgets the time app if you touch the clock what apps it's gonna watch so if you have a custom clock application that you like to to use you can set that date application forecast application unlock animations now this is kind of worded weird this isn't to unlock any animations that are built in this is to animate the weather across the screen when you unlock your device and usually when I turn on my device I just want to get working on it and that that little animation although cool can really impress your friends it takes up a little bit more time than I'd like and I just have that turned off try it both ways I really like it the first few times that you use it for GPS for geolocation alternate geo decoder fast open effect yada yada yada changelog okay any developers listening put this in your app that's really really a nice feature so we can see what you changed since last time even if it's a bug fix or what not so anyway let's go back to appearance and this is where some stuff has changed superclocked skins new skins for the superblock very obviously unfortunately this just came out so it comes with a standard skin which doesn't really even look like what it looks like so I think that'll be fixed in an upcoming one if we go to download skins there's only two available so and we need to wait for some of those to come out but even still it looks very gingerbread like so if you want to throw a gingerbread look and feel on your Froyo or Eclair phone go ahead and do that you can set the weather skins as well what you want those weather icons to look like battery skins are new obviously with this and background transparencies and some other stuff we can go ahead and save and apply that and since I'm using a VW lunch or e^x it asks me how big do I want this widget I'm gonna accept the default 4x2 and there we've got that there are lots of different sizes too if I want to use the four by one to compress it a little bit I can do that if I want to use the two by one I can team that up with the little forecast widget next to it once it's just a one by one and really save some space so I can do lots of cool stuff so really neat go out and grab that it's an update available in the market but we're not done yet I've got one more thing that I want to show you and that's the beautiful live weather wallpaper all right so I've cleared my screen and believe it or not this is the live weather wallpaper and it doesn't look like much because it's really overcast and foggy and cloudy outside right now and that's actually pretty much what it looks like so it's really realistic but let's go in and look at some stuff I'm going to long hold and go into wallpapers once in wallpaper of course I'm going to go down to a live wallpapers since that's what this is and you'll notice I've got two of them now I've got beautiful live weather and I'm gonna go ahead and launch that one and just set it with my settings because it remembered that and I've got kind of this herky-jerky animation I actually have this set up using a setting called CPU hog and I've got my frames per second set to 25 so it's pretty much as smooth as it can get you can also see kind of some static stuff down here it can show the the Sun and the moon so in the daytime the Sun rises and sets and the moon rises and sets it's really kind of cool looking and then of course you can have animated grass on the bottom which I I'm not partial to that so I turn that off but really kind of cool and you guys have asked me a ton about that you know what is this oh it's by level up Studios go ahead and search for them in the the Android Market you can download this the wallpaper last time I checked is free but to get the the weather updates you need to have the last app that I just showed you which is those those beautiful widgets but this isn't the cool part you ready for what he's done today let's go ahead and look at this new one again live wallpaper beautiful live weather with OpenGL OpenGL is the open graphics library for those of you that don't know and it's really really powerful so let's just take a look at this first of all you'll notice the animations are a ton smoother and he's doing a lot more stuff with it with the Sun rising and setting it gets dark there's a sunset the moon rises and then the moon sets just really cool really fluid really smooth I know you're gonna ask well Joe how does that affect the battery life I have no clue I just got this this morning please let us know in the comments what your battery life is like is it better than the last one is it worse we want to know and I think community feedback to the best way to do that so let us know in the comments the settings are basically the same with some differences we can go in to animate the Sun the moon which I have set we can set a custom background which I haven't done yet simply because I don't have a good one on my phone but this means that you can use your own images to background so it kind of and I don't want to take credit for this because I don't know if this was me that the idea came from or not but I did submit this as an idea hey why don't we have a background that you can set it's your own custom picture and then I'll lay the weather animations and whatnot over the top of it so uh okay I'll take credit for that although I don't know if it was from me that he actually implemented it but it was my idea so there you go straight from pocketnow.com grass-type this is new we go in here we have three different types we've got the green grass we've got the yellow grass and we've got wheat i'll show you we just because it's kind of neat we have to enable or disable the grass i'm gonna go ahead and enable it cpu hog of course that means it uses more CPU resources for smoother animations kind of make sense it also chews up your battery faster which also makes sense but it's only gonna do that when your screen is on so it's not gonna use that much or it shouldn't come in here to target frames per second and 25 is the stock but check this out you can go all the way up to unlimited high of 40 and then some and a low 15 so it's really really opened up how fluid it can get but let's go ahead and and set this up using these and I'll just show you right here because it's a little bit nicer than what you're gonna see if I go back to my my home screen because it's just gonna be fog you can see here they the wheat blowing in the the breeze there Sun comes up Sun comes down shows you the the clouds and those clouds change based on what the weather is like if it's snowing you're gonna have snowflakes you'll even have some accumulation if it's raining you'll have rain if it's foggy you'll have fog if it's going to have a combination you have a combination one of the things I like is when it rains you get rain dots on your phone or at least that's what it looks like there's spots all over the phone looks like you've been out in the rain and your phone's gotten wet so really cool update just came out go ahead and grab that from the market if you haven't done so already again the wallpaper app is free you just don't get the live weather updates unless you have the partner app which is that beautiful live widgets so very cool from level up Studios we'd like to see what you think of the new and of course leave those in the comments down below and to keep up to date on on these changes to this app in the future and other changes too or other new apps that do similar stuff make sure you subscribe to our video channel it's free and you get to keep up-to-date and really kind of impress your friends with your huge knowledge of all the stuff that's going on in the mobile marketplace for Joe I'm Joe for pocketnow.com