Glass Widgets – Minimal & Functional Android Widgets
by Paul Wilks
Sep 29, 2011 1:38 PM –
Install
Glass Widgets is a smart functional set of widgets for your Android. It provides a simple-yet-cool calendar, clock & weather or news feed widget for your homescreens. There is also a widget that incorporates all three of these into one larger widget. Great for modders and fans of functional minimalist design, Glass Widgets is a brilliant app for adding useful and stylish features to your screens.
Price: Free, ~$1.10
Tested on: HTC Desire HD
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- 4 widgets, 3 individual or 1 that incorporates all!
- Simple to configure and install!
- Lots of settings and customizations!
- Great design!
- Compliments most launchers!
Cons
- Limited to only 3 widget types.
Features:
In my humble opinion, there are few things as satisfying on having a really sweet set of homescreens. Regardless of the launcher you use, you will often rely on 3rd party widgets and modifications. Sometimes getting these widgets to look good alongside your launcher-native ones, or within your general ‘theme’ can sometimes be a challenge.
Glass Widgets is perhaps a great solution for this kind of conundrum. The widgets are simple, stylish and minimalist- so tend to look quite good alongside most set-ups. The app comes with 4 widgets in total:
- Clock widget- this shows a basic digital clock interface and accompanying weather indicator, which shows location, temperature and weather condition.
- Calendar- this shows your most current agenda items straight from your calendar. It also shows the full date.
- News feed- this shows the most current stories from the news source of your choice. It provides a number of pre-set feeds, but you can enter your own and have the top headlines from any news site right in the widget.
- All-in-one- this widget stacks each of the above widgets into one, taking up 4×3 spaces on your home screen.
The app allows you to set any destination when you tap the widget; I imagine you might prefer to push the clock widget to ‘Clock’, calendar to ‘Calendar’ and News widget to either browser or other news app, but you have the choice- great if you use 3rd party apps for these fundamental Android features.
Glass Widgets have a great design and, because of the minimal styling, tend to work well with most wallpapers, themes and homescreen launchers. They are simple, functional and look good. It’s almost a shame that there are only 3 functions (clock, calendar and news) available. However the app is pretty much free- although you can get an unlocked version which gives you the ability to change the text and background color if you wish.
I am forever tampering with my homescreens- changing looks, themes, launchers and ROMs, but Glass Widgets regularly becomes one of the first apps I download as it tends to look quite cool whatever I am using. The minimalist style might not be for everyone but it has been incredibly popular in the Android Market and, if you haven’t already, you should definitely have a look.
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Glass Widgets – All-in-one widget
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Glass Widgets – 4 widgets to choose from
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Glass Widgets – Clock and News widget on homescreen
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Glass Widgets – Clock widget
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Glass Widgets – Configure all-in-one widget
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Glass Widgets – News configuration
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Glass Widgets – Clock configuration
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Glass Widgets – Update interval options
Usefulness:
I think most people tend to like having a clock widget of some kind on their homescreen, so this will apply to many. A calendar too is an essential for those of us who lead busy lives. The news app might be down to taste and a users news consumption, but its cool to note the headlines on the go. Tapping the body of the news widget flicks you through the headlines and tapping the source icon will offer to take you to the story in-browser if you want to read more.
Ease of Use:
There’s quite a few options when you are configuring the widgets, but they are all quite intuitive and straightforward to complete. Once set up it’s simple to immediately enter the parent apps by tapping.
Frequently Used:
Clock, calendar and news are big big functions and the Android Marketplace teems with 3rd party sources, apps and widgets. This begins to indicate how much such apps are used on peoples phones. I personally check the clock on my phone all the time, the calendar a few times a day and the news several times too. I think I might be fairly typical so it is definitely an app you will use often.
Interface:
As discussed the interface looks quite simple and minimalist. The menus and settings screen are quite basic but it is easy to understand and has plenty of features. There are lots of options so you can change much of the interface through your tweaking. It’s sometimes best to load the basic widget up, then adjust it according to your tastes as you go along.
Tags:
Android App,
Android Apps,
AndroidTapp.com App Review,
Calendar,
Clock,
Glass Widgets,
Modding,
News,
themes,
Weather
Categorised in: Personalization
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