About a week or two ago, we bought you an article about the support of widgets in Google SDK 1.5. In that same article I mentioned the Droid Dev challenge sponsored by Android-dls.com. I’m using this competition as an opportunity to provide a tutorial for creating widgets that builds upon the existing information.
First, a disclaimer. Don’t use this tutorial in lieu of the quality information already out there. This tutorial is going to be condensed at best. I recommend checking out
- Google AppWidget API.
- Android Developers Blog entry on Widgets
- There are a lot of good links from here
Ok, ready to begin? First, I suppose, you need to come up with a widget idea. My widget idea comes from a response to a blog post I made on Google And Blog. One user speculated that it would be useful to have a live folder for last x-number of unread e-mail. I’m going to apply that idea to a widget. Lets aim for a widget that shows your last unread e-mail, and upon clicking expands to show your last screen-full of unread e-mails, and has an option to go to either the gmail application, or the m.gmail.com website.
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