Essential Apps is a wonderful app. It’s fun to create widgets. I’ve experimented a little now and would like to share my experiences.
Unfortunately, widgets that access location data don’t work at the moment. I created a Lost Places widget that’s supposed to show me abandoned places nearby. Unfortunately, it doesn’t access my location—instead, it shows me Lost Places across all of Germany, with incorrect distance information.
I’m also having issues with weather data. I wanted to create a garden widget that accesses my location and tells me how to respond to the weather. For example: if it’s been dry for days, the widget should remind me to water the plants. This widget doesn’t work at all, and I gave up after 8 versions.
So I tried out less personalized widgets, and those work great. First, I created a Breakout game—that’s really fun.
Another widget shows me historical facts and rotates hourly. That’s enjoyable; there are some interesting facts in there.
A Taboo game widget. That one worked great by the second version. It has a timer and a scoring system. I really hope I’ll be able to share this widget at the end of the beta, so that we can display the game synchronously on two phones.
Lastly, I created a movie quiz—that worked right away too. I only had to specify in the second version that already-played questions should be filtered out.
I’m very satisfied with Essential Apps and am excited to see what others develop.
Phone 3a
