Talk all you want about soft keyboard and video recording, but the biggest change in Android will be the implementation of widgets. Starting with calendars, picture frames, and playlists, Google is offering up a few official widgets for your Android home screen. It won’t be long until we see RSS readers, twitter clients, stock tickers and more. So just what are the guidelines for creating a widget? The Android Developers blog just published an article that starts to help developers head down the right path.
We’ve designed widgets to fit within our Home screen grid framework, which means you and your designer can create a widget within a 4×1, 3×3, or 2×2 grid cell, depending on the space you need for an at-a-glance summary of information from your application. To illustrate the preferred ways to design widgets for the home screen, we’ve assembled Widget Design Guidelines.
The widget article was written by Chris Nesladek, who is heading the session titled Pixel Perfect Code: How to Marry Interaction and Visual Design the Android Way at Google I/O at the end of May.
Be sure to keep checking the official blog as well as here in the coming weeks as more details and tips will be coming. Developers will even have access to the iconography that Google uses so that widgets can be made with consistent Android look.
Comments are closed.