Introducing Widgets

[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