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Android Widgets

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Introducing Widgets

1:26 with Ben Deitch

In this video we'll learn what widgets are and talk about what we'll be doing in the course!

[MUSIC] 0:00
Hi, I'm Ben, and I'm here to tell you about a little thing called widgets. 0:04
Widgets are a fantastic way to keep your users 0:09
up to date with what's going on in your app. 0:12
With just a quick glance at the home screen, you can inform users 0:14
about what's important without requiring them to open anything. 0:17
It's a great way to help save your users some time and 0:21
it gives your app a leg up on the competition. 0:24
On top of that, we can even add interactions with our widgets, 0:27
letting our users complete simple tasks right from the home screen. 0:30
However, widgets aren't quite like the rest of Android. 0:34
In fact, widgets are best thought of as views that you can embed in other apps. 0:37
Also, an app that can contain a widget is called an app widget host. 0:43
So your home screen app is almost definitely an app widget host. 0:47
Unfortunately this presents us with a few problems. 0:51
For starters, how do we communicate with a view that's inside another app? 0:55
And how would we even initialize that view in the first place? 0:59
We'll answer all of these all these questions in just a short while but for 1:03
now, let's start off with just creating a simple widget to display a color. 1:06
Then we'll build from that until we're finally able to display a list and 1:11
interact with that list right from our widget. 1:14
It'll be a lot of work, but we're going to take this one step at a time and 1:17
explain everything along the way. 1:20
So without further ado, let's move on to creating a widget. 1:23