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Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Zooper Widget - Your design guide and how to build a custom widget from scratch

You must know by now that I am a huge fan and user of Zooper Widget for the design and function of my Android devices. There is little that Zooper cannot do design wise, and paired with Tasker to add functionality, I have no other widgets running on any of my devices. (Except the stock music player widget, but I'm working on creating my own there too.)

I promise you that a great article on how to integrate Tasker and Zooper Widget is on its way, for today, I want to introduce you to my most comprehensive Zooper Widget guide yet.

As has been true for the last while, my guide is found over on Android Authority.

As the guide walks you through building your own custom widget from scratch, I made sure to describe each and every design element of Zooper Widget and provide an example of basic usage at a minimum, sometimes adding a little twist.

With the sheer magnitude of possibilities one is able to delve into with Zooper Widget, I was not able to cover absolutely every unique option for all of the elements. I feel especially that working with the Rect element (short for Rectangle) can go well beyond the two main concepts presented. I urge you to play with the Rect element and you'll find that it can do a lot. Try layering Rects and adjusting drawing modes, some really neat effects can be produced with the XOR mode.

Lastly, element layering is important. I explained the importance of the top down layout, and I showed how to move an element, but again, please play around, you may find that layering, like the XOR effect, can create some really cool designs.




As always, let us know how it goes for you by commenting below. Feel free to submit screenshots of your results. We love to see what people are doing with their Android device Homescreen designs.

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