Sunday, October 27, 2013

STRINGS is here!!

In celebration of the release of STRINGS, by Allison M. Dickson (a brilliant lady I know, she lets me fix her appliances), I thought it would be nice to release a little extra promotional material that people could carry with them.

As my latest obsession on my phone was to optimize productivity and minimize any unnecessary clutter, I've been going through a number of apps that allow you to set up your own self-created widgets, since most that I've found don't quite do enough. My first was Minimalistic Text, which is great with all it can do, but a pain to set back up when you flash new ROMs on your phone as much as I do. I believe I've found a happier home now with UCCW (Ultimate Custom Clock Widget), which allows more functionality in a single widget, as well as being able to display graphics. The best thing for all the STRINGS fans though, is that it allows me to take the skin I made for STRINGS and put it on the Google Play Store for you to install and enjoy!!
There are a few things to cover in setting this up on your Android home screen:

  1. You need to install UCCW first before you can expect to do anything with my app.
  2. Simply installing my app won't get you anywhere, as you can't run it and expect something to happen. It's only a skin for UCCW, basically a few images and instructions to tell UCCW how to make a home screen widget the way I want it made.
  3. The first part of UCCW that you will need to concern yourself with in order to get this all up and running is the app portion, where you run it from your App Drawer and configure the weather settings to feed the right weather service data, temperature measurements, and rate of updating the current weather information.
  4. The second part of UCCW to work with, after installing the STRINGS skin is to set up your home screen widget. This can happen any number of ways, depending on your phone or tablet's launcher. Some can be selected from the home screen with a long-press on an open piece of desktop, others let you select them from the home screen by pressing your Menu button, and others allow your to select them from the Widget section of the app drawer. In any case, you need to select UCCW, then UCCW will ask you what size you want the widget to be. A good default is 4x3 (Columns x Rows), but feel free to make it what you have room for on your screen. Once you have selected the size, UCCW will present the list of skins, which is where you will find STRINGS with a BIG picture, waiting for your selection.
  5. Once you have made your selection, you'll be taken back to your home screen and you'll see a hand inviting you to touch the screen to start the widget.
Now, you should have STRINGS on your home screen waiting for you to enjoy both its form, and function. The colors of the 3 red circles and 3 gray circles can all be independently set. Pressing the "hidden button" (in light green below) toward the top of the right-most (darkest) red circle, will open up the UCCW editor, where you can change the colors AND functions of the hotspots to better fit your needs.
I hope you enjoy the skin, and recommend it to your friends to help spread the word about STRINGS!!

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