What is the best android widget

19 Best Android Widgets, No Matter Which Android Phone You’re Using

A home screen widget is a unique feature of the Android OS—other mobile operating systems don’t offer them at all. If you aren’t sure what a widget is, it is a shortcut to accessing basic functions of an app. Some widgets will show the time or weather, while others will show calendar appointments, battery information, or let you raise a digital pet.

Keep in mind that widgets can be a little more of a battery drain than not using a widget, but in most cases they are extremely useful and well worth the trade-off.

HD Widgets

HD Widgets are some of the most configurable information widgets in the Google Play Store. They have a lot of different sizes, with some of the large sized ones being 6×2 so they fill up the width of a 7 inch Android tablet pretty well. Within the different sizes are different set configurations: some of the sizes allow for parts of the widget to be changes, while all of them allow for colors and style do be changed.

Evernote Widget

The Evernote widget is configurable and lets you have fast access to some of the most popular note options. For example, you can start a note from an image by pressing on the camera icon in the widget. You also have a search tab for quick access to search for a tag, notebook or note.

Android Pro Widgets

Android Pro Widgets are a combination of different widgets. In this combo pack, you will see separate ones for Agenda & Calendar, Contacts, Bookmarks, Messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader. All of which have the option to be styled and look, and many of the widgets allow for scrolling as long as your Launcher allows for it as well.

Beautiful Widgets

Beautiful Widgets are, well, beautiful. 🙂 This group offers a lot of different configurable sizes from 1×1 to 4×2. Depending on the size you can easily make changes like removing the weather icon and add a more useful battery level icon, and then you can choose the look of the battery icon. Add the animation add-on for an even better-looking widget.

Battery HD

Having a hot-looking battery widget will add to the aesthetics of your home screen rather than detracting from it. Depending on the location available on your home screen, you can choose from either a horizontal or vertical battery widget. When clicked, you can see a lot of information such as usage and battery health.

BeWeather & Widgets

BeWeather is a fantastic weather widget: not only will you love the look of it, you will have access to features like the weather radar so you can see if bad weather is on the way or if it looks like it will miss you. You will also have the temperature displayed in the notification bar.

DroidPet Widget

People love to take care of pets. For people with allergies or who can’t have pets where they live, DroidPet Widget is a great way to fill the void you feel. Take care of up to 5 pets at the same time by petting them, playing with them, and keeping them happy or they will go to the special farm where animals go to live when no-one wants them.

Agenda Widget Ultimate

On a busy day, you just need to see what appointment is next and when you have time to schedule other things, like a lunch break. Agenda view is ideal for this and that’s what you get with Agenda Widget Ultimate: a great-looking, easy-to-read widget with all of your appointments laid out in a way where you can scan them easily. This is a great option for someone transitioning from a paper planner.

Days Left Widget

We all have days we are excited about and count down to, like days ’til vacation, Christmas, a birthday or anniversary. Days Left Widget lets you add little widgets to your home screen counting down to that special day. You can add several to the home screen, each with different countdowns.

DIGI Clock Widget

On some Android devices, the clocks leave something to be desired. Adding DIGI Clock Widget to your Android will give you a lot more control over what your clock looks like: you can change the colors, fonts and date format to what you prefer. Simple and clean, just like a clock should be.

Sense Analog Clock Widget

Do you like the way the HTC clock widget looks but don’t have an HTC device? Sense Analog Clock Widget creates a good likeness of the HTC Sense clock on your non-HTC device. The good-looking flip clock and weather widgets are sure to create a pleasing space filler on your home screen.

Fancy Widgets

These widgets live up to their namesake, with over 400 different clock and weather skins available for you to get just the right look. Your choice of weather services, configurable time, refresh interval, and tap actions make for a very usable set of widgets in many different sizes.

Multicon Widget

Multicon lets you add more than the usual number of application icons to your home screen. Instead of having a few app icons on each of your screens, you can load them all on one. Select the number of rows and columns you’d like in the grid then start adding apps—it’s that simple.

Next Switch Widget

neXt Launcher is a new-ish launcher by the GO Dev group. They make awesome apps like GO Launcher EX and GO SMS Pro. While the neXt Launcher is a paid launcher, neXt Switch is a free add-on. You have very stylish widgets to turn on and off functions of your device such as Bluetooth or Data Syncing.

Slider Widget – Volumes

Need fast access to the volume controls for various parts of your Android device? Slider Widget – Volumes grants that wish. In addition to being able to quickly change the volume of media, ringtones and other sounds, you can adjust the screen brightness and other adjustments too.

‘Today in History’ Widget

‘Today in History’ Widget scans many different sources to bring you the most interesting historical events that happened on this day. Sources such as the New York Times and BBC are sure to have a healthy knowledge of historical events around the world. The preceding day is downloaded so you don’t always need to be connected to the internet to have your day in history.

Wizz Widget

Wizz Widget is a collection of different widgets for commonly-used apps. The Stacks are pretty cool, and they let you flip through the days in your calendar or the tweets in your Twitter timeline. The widgets are resizable and configurable—just set the refresh interval, color, transparency and more.

Tabr widget

Tabr widget is a pretty unique take on widgets, and within one widget you can have different modules. These modules show up in tabs, making it super easy to switch to the information you’d like to access. Add modules for your calendar, social networks, contacts and more.

Chameleon Launcher for Tablets

While Chameleon Launcher for Tablets is not a widget, it increases your productivity through the use of widgets. You choose the area of the screen where you’d like to have a widget for Twitter or an RSS feed, and place it there. The widgets fit together really tight to maximize your screen space.

What widget do you absolutely love that’s not on this list? Let us know what it is and why you love it in the comments below.

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Trevor Dobrygoski

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How to Make Private Browsing on Safari Truly Private

There comes a time when we may be searching online and don’t want the browser to remember our footsteps. The reasons don’t always have to be what we obviously think of as the main reason; for example, sometimes, you may not want Safari to remember your passwords or prompt you to enter your password when surfing the web.

Whatever the reason, we may think that we are totally in the clear with Private Browsing on Safari and the other browsers on a Mac. However, a quick Terminal command can bring up every website you’ve visited. How do you do this? Also, how do you clear your tracks for good? We will provide both answers and more today.

What Does Private Browsing Do?

When activated, Private Browsing on Safari prevents your browsing history from being kept in the history tab of the application. Along with this, it doesn’t autofill information that you have saved in the browser. In this mode, you essentially become incognito and any references of previous use is essentially hidden when you are in private mode.

For example: if you are on Facebook or filling out a form and some information or your login is already filled in in the spaces provided, this is called autofill. It’s activated by simply clicking Safari next to the Apple symbol in the menubar and selecting Private Browsing, then clicking “OK” to the prompt.

The reasons behind private mode differ for each individual. While we won’t go into all of those reasons, one thing that is important to remember is that private browsing doesn’t forget the websites you visit. As we will see later on, Macs keep a second copy of the websites you visit in either mode. If you are in frantic mode looking for a solution to this, look no further.

The Terminal Archive

While Safari does a good job of keeping your search history out of prying eyes in the history tab, there is a less-than-obvious way to view a full list of visited websites on Mac. This is done in Terminal; the command-line emulator that allows you to make changes to your Mac.

Terminal is located in the Utilities folder on your Mac. Once activated, simply add the command:

dscacheutil -cachedump -entries Host

Once you hit “enter”, a list of the visited sites appear. Showing only the domains, the sites appear in a format of:

Key: h_name :(website domain)ipv4 :1

However, there’s no need to fear—there is a way you can clear this information from Terminal with a command that’s just as simple.

Clearing Your Tracks

Just as simply as you were able to enter the command to view the websites, you can clear the cache that Terminal showed you with the comamnd:

dscacheutil -flushcache

As the command denotes, this literally “flushes” the domains from Terminal. This does not prevent the record from continuing to be recorded for future sites, however, so if that’s an issue for you, repeat this process regularly.

Other Browsers and Private Browsing

Other browsers have this form of privacy mode for their service. They promise many of the same things as Safari, but they do not have the same Terminal issue due to how this command only presents websites visited on Safari (the browser Macs come shipped with).

If you use Firefox, you’ll notice that its private mode is also known as Private Browsing. Chrome calls private mode Incognito, while Internet Explorer refers to it as InPrivate Browsing. Opera is the newest to the scene, denoting it as Private Tab. Safari is the oldest well-known browser with this feature.

As you can see, despite Private Browsing not being 100% private, Terminal allows for your browser to be. In what ways has Terminal helped your life or allowed you to become more productive? Let us know in the comments below.

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The 15 best Android widgets

Widgets: The Android advantage

Android still has one major advantage over iOS and Windows Phone 8: widgets. Widgets are convenient apps that display information directly from the home screen. They’re different from Windows Phone’s Live Tiles because they can also be interactive. Widgets are typically packaged with apps (when you download an app, you’ll also get its widget), but you can also get “pure” widgets from the Google Play Store.

Here are 15 of the coolest widgets that every Android user should check out. Take that, Apple!

Beautiful Widgets

Beautiful Widgets is a set of good-looking widgets for your Android home screen. For just over $3, Beautiful Widgets provides several attractive, animated widgets in different sizes, including clock widgets, weather widgets, date widgets, and toggle widgets. The widgets are all customizable, and you can pick up free user-made skins from the Beautiful Widgets Skin Market. LevelUp Studios just recently released a free version of Beautiful Widgets, which comes with three widgets (clock, weather, and Wi-Fi toggle) and the ability to download 10 themes. If you want more, you’ll have to pay for the full version or make in-app purchases.

Shazam

Shazam is a free tool that recognizes songs by “listening” to them through your phone’s microphone. Unfortunately, in order to use Shazam, you have to open the app and tap the button to begin the recognition process. By the time you manage to accomplish this, the song may be over.

Enter the Shazam widget, which puts a Shazam button directly on your home screen. Now, all you have to do is tap it when you hear a song you’re curious about.

HD widgets

Beautiful Widgets may be all about customization and user-created skins, but HD Widgets are just plain gorgeous. This set of widgets includes clock and weather widgets, as well as custom toggle buttons for various settings (such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, tilt lock, and screen brightness). If you want your home screen to look polished and pretty, the $2 you spend on HD Widgets will be well worth it. These widgets feature professionally-designed aero-style skins, modern-looking fonts, and tons of color customization options.

ESPN ScoreCenter

A must-have for any sports fan, ESPN ScoreCenter is a customizable app that lets you pick your favorite teams from various sports leagues, from the NFL to Colombian soccer.

The app comes with two widgets: a ScoreCenter widget, which shows you game and scoring information on your hand-picked favorite teams; and a Video widget, which scrolls through the day’s hot sports videos. You can tap either widget to open the app and get more info.

Pulse News

Pulse News is the ultimate app for news junkies: It delivers news from all of your favorite websites, online newspapers and magazines, and blogs in an easy-to-read format.

Pulse offers three widget sizes: large, small, and tiny. Each widget can display headlines from one of your favorite sources, and you can click any headline to get the full story.

AudioManager

AudioManager is an excellent free widget that shows you what the current volume levels are for each of your device’s audio signals–for your alarm, media, alerts, ringer, system, and voice calls. Tapping the widget takes you to the app, where you can adjust the various levels individually.

Aix Weather Widget

You get a weather widget in Beautiful Widgets, but the Aix Weather Widget takes weather tracking to the next level. Purely a home screen widget, Aix shows temperature, maximum/minimum precipitation, and sunrise/sunset times in a pretty graph.

Even if you aren’t obsessed with having detailed, accurate weather information, Aix is cool to look at.

Clockr

Clockr is a simple text-based clock widget that instantly transforms your Android home screen into a work of modern art.

The widget is mildly customizable: You can choose the format Clockr uses to display the time, and the color of the text.

Twitter

Using Twitter, even casually, requires that you be available on the social network during much of the day. You can meet that requirement a little more easily by adding Twitter’s widget to your home screen.

I like the simplicity of Twitter’s widget: You can choose to show new Tweets from your feed, or Tweets that mention you. You can also write a Tweet directly from the widget, without having to open an app. And that’s really all you need.

Car Widget

If you ever use your phone while driving—and let’s face it, you probably do—Car Widget can help you stay a little bit safer on the road. This full-screen widget lets you dedicate one of your home screens to a large-icon car mode. The default screen features six large icons: Navigation, phone, contacts, maps, and two customizable icons. You can customize the last two icons to do pretty much whatever you want: open an app, direct dial a contact, or open a specific Gmail folder. There’s also a pro version, which costs $2 and lets you determine how your phone detects when you’re inside a car (and what settings to adjust accordingly).

Google Voice

Google Voice is a multifaceted service that lets you make cheap international calls, send free text messages, and (badly) convert your voice mail from voice to text.

The widget for Google Voice is very convenient if you use Google Voice as your primary voicemail service. The widget shows you the latest voicemails (in text form) and text messages that have arrived at your Google Voice account; and you can tap it to open the main Google Voice app.

Evernote

Evernote is an app that lets you take notes in various ways, including by voice memo and by picture.

Evernote’s separate, customizable widget app adds Evernote shortcuts to your home screen, such as ‘Snapshot’, ‘Audio Note’, and ‘Speech-to-text Note’; and it also displays your most recent notes.

Dictionary.com

There’s no excuse for not knowing what a word means, thanks to the Internet and smartphones.

The Dictionary.com widget displays a word of the day and lets you search the site’s dictionary or thesaurus for words you’re interested in, right from your home screen. Note: This widget takes up more than the usual amount of real estate on your screen.

Onavo Count

Unless you’re one of the lucky few who are hanging onto a grandfathered-in unlimited data plan with your broadband service, you should probably check out Onavo Count.

Onavo Count monitors the amount of data you use. Its live data usage widget lets you know, in real time, how much data you’re using and which apps are responsible.

You may be surprised by which apps secretly suck up your daily ration of data.

Holo Bulb

Never fumble in the dark again, as long as your phone is nearby. There are plenty of flashlight widgets, but Holo Bulb has one of the prettiest designs we’ve seen. This elegant, simple blue-on-dark-gray button sits on your home screen and can be tapped for light (and tapped again to turn the light off). The app itself is also elegant and minimalist, with a large tappable light bulb.

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