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