Hello. I currently use this widget app to view and update web images on my home screens. Example images are stuff like stock market images, weather radar images, web cam images, etc... I can set the update frequency of the images and have various options like "touch to update" or "show the image in its own web viewer", etc... There are also options for scaling and cropping the images to fit and zoom with the given widget size on the home screen.
Problem is, the app pretty much sucks, doesn't work some of the time and development stopped on it quite some time ago with no response from the developer on issues.
I got turned on to kwgt as a possible replacement and although it has potential, it would be great to have some added fine grained capabilities when it comes to image items and some other things.
- Image (bitmap) borders (set the width, color, style of the border)
- scaling options like "fit, scale (fit but keep aspect ratio) or center image to widget container"
- image cropping options such as "crop image 20 pixels on left, 50 pixels on right, etc...
- per widget image update options not just one global update cycle for all widgets and allow for custom update cycle entry, not just a pick list of 4 or 5 (10 min, 30 min, 1 hour, etc...)
- "on touch -> update image"... don't update all widgets... just the one I touched.
- This one isn't image specific... Add a new item type for popup menus/pick lists. The user could assign a menu to the widget touch... In the menu you could assign tasks... "update image" "open image in browser" "configure widget", etc... When you touch the widget a menu or pick list would popup giving the above options.
- another non image specific... Add the ability to place a piece of text that shows the time/date that the widget was last updated and optionally the ability to show the estimated "next update" time. So, if I touch the widget and it updates the image, the text that I placed would show that time the widget got the new image... then might show a time countdown anticipated until the next auto update.
- A toast popup/notification option when a new image is retrieved and displayed. That way the user knows that the app did in fact obtain a new image.
- a text item type or toast popup notification or something that would indicate whether the image changed when it updated. For example, if I have a weather radar image and it updates to a new image... do some sort of pixel comparison and if there are actual changes, indicate via a piece of text to toast popup "image updated" or "no changes to image" or a thumbs up icon or something. The reason for this is that sometimes an image will update but nothing actually changed because, for example, on the server side, the image request was between updates on their system, such as that radar example. Those update every 7 minutes or so but my widget may not be in sync with that so sometimes I'll get a new image but it's the same image as previously downloaded.
Anyway, you can see where I'm going with all this. More functionality around using kwgt as a robust, fine grained homescreen web image viewer widget maker.
Thanks much.