Android Application Development For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Working with App Widgets in Android

A Home screen widget (or app widget) in Android is a special kind of view that can be embedded on your device’s Home screen. An app widget can accept user input via click events, and it can update itself regularly. A user can add an app widget to the Home screen by tapping the Applications button and then selecting Widgets. The result is shown in Figure 7-1.

Figure 7-1: Adding a widget to the Home screen.

To make the Silent Mode Toggle application more usable, build a Home screen widget for it so that users can add the widget to the Home screen. Tapping the widget changes the phone’s ringer mode automatically without having to open the application. The widget also updates its layout to indicate what state the phone is in, as shown in Figure 7-2.

Figure 7-2: The two states of the app widget.

Working with remote views

When you develop apps in Android, remember that it’s based on the Linux 2.6 kernel. Linux comes supplied with its own idioms (or “dialect”) about security, and the Android platform inherits them. For example, the Android security model is heavily based around the Linux user, file, and process security model.

Because every Android ...