Chapter 7
Turning Your Application into a Home Screen Widget
In This Chapter
Seeing how app widgets work in Android
Understanding pending intents
Building an App Widget Provider
Putting your widget on the Home screen
Usability is the name of the game in regard to all disciples of application development: If your application isn’t usable, users simply won’t use it.
If you’ve followed the first six chapters of this book to build the Silent Mode Toggle application, it undoubtedly works well and is highly usable. Unfortunately, if the application were published at the Google Play Store, it likely wouldn’t be popular yet because a user would have to open the app and then tap a button to silence the phone. If the user hasn’t created a Home screen shortcut to the application, and the app is buried in the application launcher with other applications, a few extra steps are required: Unlock the phone, open the launcher, locate the app, open the app, and then tap the Silent button. At this point, the user might as well press the Volume Up and Volume Down keys to silence the phone. To make this ...
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