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[MUSIC]

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Hi, I'm Ben, and I'm here to tell you
about a little thing called widgets.

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Widgets are a fantastic
way to keep your users

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up to date with what's
going on in your app.

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With just a quick glance at the home
screen, you can inform users

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about what's important without
requiring them to open anything.

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It's a great way to help save
your users some time and

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it gives your app a leg
up on the competition.

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On top of that, we can even add
interactions with our widgets,

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letting our users complete simple
tasks right from the home screen.

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However, widgets aren't quite
like the rest of Android.

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In fact, widgets are best thought of as
views that you can embed in other apps.

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Also, an app that can contain a widget
is called an app widget host.

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So your home screen app is almost
definitely an app widget host.

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Unfortunately this presents
us with a few problems.

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For starters, how do we communicate
with a view that's inside another app?

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And how would we even initialize
that view in the first place?

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We'll answer all of these all these
questions in just a short while but for

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now, let's start off with just creating
a simple widget to display a color.

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Then we'll build from that until we're
finally able to display a list and

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interact with that list
right from our widget.

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It'll be a lot of work, but we're going
to take this one step at a time and

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explain everything along the way.

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So without further ado,
let's move on to creating a widget.