Widgets; love ‘em or hate ‘em – they serve a good purpose – beer included. Most devices that provide a customizable homescreen (Android, WebOS, Symbian and Maemo 5), use widget entries as “feeds” to information or shortcuts to applications. I previously took a look at my favorite weather widgets and decided that while the great MaemoFanatic trio (Mike, Kyron and yours truly) get their top themes and customizations going, I’d post about my recommended widgets. Some are ‘stock’ and some are third party (found by enabling extra repositories).
1). RSS – A quick way to keep on top of your news feeds. I only use one feed on it, as it gets a bit crowded and takes quite a while to update. Right from the widget, you can scroll and refresh the feed.
Tapping a news entry will take you into the full RSS reader, which is not that fun to use. Many will prefer to use ReSiStance or GRR.
2). ConnectNow – Provides quick shortcuts to saved connections with resizable and configurable icons. Gives you one touch connectivity to cellular, home, work or whatever other networks you may regularly use.
The shortcuts will immediately start the respective connection, and the “beacons” will change to blue when the connection is made. Very easy and very nice.
3). Calendar Home Widget – A replacement widget for the horrible Maemo 5 calendar one provided. It looks the same, but has a lot more functionality, settings and customization.
It is an initial release and there are a few bugs that have been reported. You can see that entries are not “ellipsed” nicely, and a comparison (below) shows that not all birthdays are imported properly. Let’s play spot the differences. Entry colors have icons, I have more entries and the current month is also displayed. Wait, I’m also missing a birthday there. Yes, our own EverythingBlaxx is celebrating his quarter-century birthday tomorrow. Shout outs to him. Send him a cake in the mail. A file or shank might be a good thing, who knows what kind of trouble he’ll run into this weekend.
4). TuneWiki – This widget initially came bundled with the N900. For some reason it seems to have been discontinued. I find that coupled with the media player widget, it does seem to lag the device a bit when music is playing. It basically provides lyrics for any music that is playing through the default media player. Of course, it uses the TuneWiki lyrics database, so chances are – if you listen to anything but popular/top100 chart music, you won’t get fed lyrics. Nevetheless, it’s a neat addition.
5). TouchSearch – I’m sure you’ve all seen this widget, but I’ve included it anyways, only so I had a good number of widgets. 5 is half of 10, and 10 is 01 backwards, which is binary and “0111001101101001011011010110111101101110” in binary is “simon”. So there you have it. 5 widgets.
TouchSearch is very minimalistic, but provides you with a, get this, touchable button for searching! Tapping on the text will bring up a box for searching. Tapping on the plus, will allow you to change the search location and type.
You can adjust how the widget looks and you can even create your own search engine entries.
So, however you setup your N900’s homescreen, it’s up to you. The customization options are endless and it’s one of the many reasons that Maemo is such a great platform.
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Simon has written 8 articles for your enjoyment.
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