The problem of widget disorganization in Android has been approaching for some time. Now that many of the most popular apps come with widgets, I’m really beginning to feel the clutter on my homescreen. With today’s release of the official Pandora app and yesterday’s release of the official Facebook app, I now have two more medium/large widgets to deal with, and some reorganization to consider.
Pandora Widget, with some 2nd wave ska
I’ve reached the point where things have gotten ugly. With traditional icon-based apps, I can at least do a cohesive theme where everything is the same size and color and it matches the background. With non-themed widgets, though…I’m kind of at the mercy of the app’s designer.
Fortunately, I can add up to 7 more homescreens with Open Home, but anyone who’s dealt with a pack-rat will tell you that giving a hoarder more space doesn’t solve any problems, it just makes them harder to tackle.
I wouldn’t call myself a “widget hoarder,” but let’s see. In my “Add to Home Screen > Widgets” folder, I currently have: Analog Clock, Calendar, Facebook, Music, Open Home Big Analog Clock, Open Home Music, Open Home Setting Widget, Open Home Weather, Pandora, Picture Frame, Search, Tiny Clock Widget 2, Twidget Lite, Voice Text, Voicemail+ Large/Small, Weather Large/Small/Tiny, Weather Channel WxWidget Large/Small.
Do I really need SIX different weather widgets and three clocks? Not really, but you sometimes need to compare to get the best looking widgets that also provide the best results, plus it’s really only three in multiple sizes. The WxWidget actually isn’t my cup of tea, though it’s a super popular and handy app with more in-depth updates and alerts, but the Weather Widget by Lock2 is 100% better looking and gets the job done (I believe it’s designed after HTC Sense’s weather widget). It’s free too, but I highly advise floating a donation their way if you’ve got some change to spare.
Before I can even begin to think about organizing anything, I have to have a deep philosophical “chicken or egg” discussion with myself: Do services gain homescreen position because I use them more, or do I use them more because they’re on my homescreen? My homescreen is usually a bit of both. I use the weather widget a lot mostly because it’s there, not because I always care about the weather. Shazam is an app icon I feel like I always need on my homescreen, but I don’t use it nearly as much as, say, the Google Search bar, which I have relegated to a secondary screen. But really, I’ve started to feel like I don’t need app shortcuts any more with the way things are going. Everything I use pretty much resides in the “side drawer.”
It’s times like this that I wish there was a Widget “snap to” program, or a position randomizer, where I could just hit a button and have the widgets fit to a grid on my screen and I could decide if I liked it or not.
New Facebook widget with Twidget Lite
Because I prefer an uncluttered layout, I’ve switched to a five-screen layout where each screen serves a different purpose. The main screen has weather and calendar, the “music screen” has the Mp3 player and Pandora, the “feed screen” has Twitter and Facebook, the “utility screen” which right now only has the settings widget, and the “Google screen” only has the search widget right now, but anticipates the arrival of new homescreen toys from Google.
It’ll get the job done for now, but more widgets=more processes which ultimately means slowness. It’s running acceptably now, but we’ll see how things get bogged down in the real world. This is something we need to think about as Android users, since the elegant use of widgets is helping to make Android both stand out above icon-based smartphone interfaces, and run more efficiently for the user.
