There is no shortage of clock and calendar widgets in the Android Market. You can find everything from the super-sleek MIUI clocks to the highly functional Simi Clock Widget and a whole bunch of them that come with launchers and widget sets. There is always some customization I have to have, but is not possible with the widget I choose.

The widget is called Minimalistic Text, and I am going to take this opportunity to introduce you to the basic concept behind it, discuss the interface and try and walk through the creation of my own customized home screen clock widget.

 

Here is a screenshot of what the end result will look like:

First, Download it!

Install it First for Free From Android Market [Download NOW]

 

Introduction

Minimalistic Text is a desktop widget creation engine that provides you with a huge range of text snippets and a simple way to lay them out in a grid. Think of it as a typesetter block that you can populate with text characters in any combination. The app works by letting you choose a widget of whatever size you need: 1×1, 1×4, 4×1, 4×4 or anything in between.

Widgets can be accessed in one of three ways: by adding a widget on an empty home screen space, by tapping an existing Minimalistic Text widget or by tapping the app’s icon in your app drawer. The latter method gives you access to all widgets you have created, and you can then tweak them further as you please.

 

The Day Widget

While one can easily find a clock widget that shows the current weekday, month and date, I like to see where I am in the week or rather how close I am to the weekend! So lets go ahead and create a row of weekdays with the current day highlighted and top it off with the current month and date on the far right.

Start by tapping and holding on a blank area of your home screen. Select Widget, scroll down the list and choose a wide enough horizontal Minimalistic Text widget. I chose the 5×1 because my screen is set to show 5 columns. Note that what options you have will depend on the apps you have installed and more importantly your launcher of choice.

 

 

Once in the ‘App-Widget Preferences’ screen, select whether you would like the widget to have a background. If you choose to have one, you can also set the color and opacity to match your wallpaper. I am going to disable the background for this setup.

 

 

Next, scroll down to the ‘Layout’ section, tap ‘Predefined layout’ and select ‘Custom…’ at the bottom of the list. The option for ‘Custom layout’ should be enabled now.

 

 

Tap ‘Custom layout’, and let the fun begin. This is the canvas where you create your own personal masterpiece. Let’s review the interface first. The boxes at the top are the set pieces for your widget, which can run into as many columns or rows as you want. To the right are buttons to add a component, add a row, and delete the last row. At the bottom is the preview of your current setup. Tap, hold and drag each of the existing pieces down to the trash bin that appears to delete them.

 

 

Tap the + icon in the top-right to start adding your new pieces. In the tabbed pane that appears at the bottom, go to "Date", scroll horizontally through the available options till you find "Day of week bar (MON)". Tap, hold and drag it to the empty row at the top. Do this for all seven days of the week (TUE, WED, etc.), placing each one to the right of the previous piece. Swipe to scroll through the boxes at the top to see them all.

 

 

You should now have all weekdays listed next to each other without any spaces. You can add spaces or any other character between them using the "Static text" pieces in the Misc tab. Drop a "Static text" piece between two weekdays, tap it and add a space in the input field. Do this for all weekdays and finish off by adding the month and date at the end of the row, divided by a bar using static text again.

 

Thats about it. Go back and tap OK on the main preferences screen to add the widget to your home screen.

The Time Widget

Lets move on to the actual clock now. Tap and hold the home screen again, and add another horizontal Minimalistic Text widget. Repeat the steps from the last time to create a custom layout, and this time add the following pieces:

• Battery level
• Hour (12h, 2 digits)
• Static text with a semi-colon (:) in the input field
• Minute (2 digits)
• AM/PM

Limitless Possibilities

Now that we have the setup we need, its time to customize the look & feel of the widgets. Tap one of the widgets to go back to the Preferences screen. There are a whole bunch of functions at your disposal to make the minimalistic text render the way you need. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Background: As I mentioned before, you can decide to have a background of any color and transparency for the widget
2. Alignment: You can choose the alignment for the entire widget block as well as individual text blocks
3. Text Style: You can have three different text styles – normal, accented and non-accented – which can be assigned to individual text blocks. Within each, you have the option to choose the font family (serif, sans-serif, etc.), style, color, size, blur.
4. Shadow: Once everything is set up, you can go in and play with the shadow settings to make the text look like it is hovering over the screen or embedded inside in letterpress style. The screenshot below shows the setup for the letterpress effect in my clock:

 

We have already told you The Times is going for the Android smartphone users. Like thats not enough, they have launched a special version of the application optimized for those of you with Honeycomb tablets. Needless to say, the new app takes advantage of larger screens modern tablets rock, putting more information on a single page.

 

Of course, this is not a 100-percent free deal, though you can try out The Times Honeycomb app free for 30 days. After that period, you will need to subscribe to keep getting all of the content, including articles, photos and video dispatches.

 

 

 

The mobile varient of this smash indy title, until now had only been available to Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY owners, but the exclusivity deal has run its course and, following an update to the app, availability has been blown wide open.

As of yesterday, Minecraft Pocket Edition is available to all droid owners, providing they’re sporting a device running Android 2.1 or higher. As we have explained before the mobile-flavored Minecraft follows in the footsteps of the full fat computer version creative mode, with no mobs to speak of and infinite block generation.

The proviso with the new availablilty is that the game will remain "PLAY optimised", this is simply a way of saying that the hardware controls of the PLAY are probably nicer to use than that of the touch screen UI, but from personal experience, the gameplay is not really watered down much by such a shortcoming.

 

 

The company behind the extremely successful Swype keyboard will be acquired by Nuance in a deal believed to be worth $102.5 million. Swype Inc., which designed the popular predictive QWERTY keyboard for touchscreens only started three years ago, but its obviously done pretty well.

Nuance mentioned that it has already paid $77.5 million to Swype shareholders, while the rest of the money will paid 18 months after the deal closes. The condition for the second payment to take place is certain key executives to still be working for Nuance.

 

 

 

 

Away Text is an app that will create an automatic away message for your phone. The idea is that when enabled, it will automatically text those who call or text you with an auto-response. Lets take a look and see if it really will!

 

Using Away Text

Away Text has a super clean interface that’s incredibly easy to use.

As you can see, there is a single textbox where you can put your status in, and an on-off switch in the top right corner to enable or disable Away Text.

 

Aside from the main screen, Away Text gives you 2 other screens: missed calls, and settings.

 

The Missed Calls screen is pretty straightforward; it displays a list of texts and calls that were sent the auto-response. One thing to note about this is that if you opt to only have the response sent to people in your Contacts, people who are not in your Contacts will not show up on that list. It also looks like each entry will not show up more than once, so if you’re looking for a comprehensive missed calls list, you will still need to go to the phone app for that.

 

In Settings, you are given a set of options on who to send the auto-response to. You can choose from missed calls, text messages, and limit it (as mentioned above) to people that are only in your contacts. Away Text also integrates Twitter and Facebook. If you authorize Away Text for Twitter and Facebook, whenever you enable Away Text, it will automatically post your auto-response to those sites.

How It Works?

Now that you are familiar with the app, lets talk about how well it works. I did a couple of tests to check the functionality of auto-responses for phone and SMS both separately and together and for posting to social networks.

 

First, posting to the social networks worked perfectly. You authorize Away Text just like you do with any other app, add your auto-response, turn it on, and you are done. Your auto-response is added to Facebook and/or Twitter. The same thing goes for responding to text messages.

 

I really like how Away Text completely silences your phone, turning off both sound and vibrate. I thought that was a really nice touch as, after all, you are supposed to be unavailable. There are no settings to change this, but I do not think thats a problem at all.

 

With the tests I did, I sent texts from my Google Voice number to my cell and it worked great. The response was sent automatically, albeit with a little ad that says, "Sent by Away Text." I also tested this cell-to-cell and it worked fine.

 

While social media and texts worked fine, I did have trouble with auto-response to phone calls. At first I tried my Google Voice number to my cell; when that didn’t work, I assumed it was because it was VoIP to cell and there was some bug. Then I tried using a couple of other cell phones to call my cell phone, but none of them got a text message with my auto-response, even after disabling and re-enabling, changing the messages, and playing with the settings. I also tried different call lengths (two rings, three rings, go to voicemail, etc.), but nothing seemed to work. After reading comments on the Market page, it looks like this is an isolated case as no one else is reporting that issue.

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Download From Android Market

 

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