We’ve got to hand it to the Android Open Kang Project: when it comes to taking advantage of the Galaxy Nexus, no one’s going faster or harder. The custom ROM team has one of the most comprehensive modifications to the Galaxy Nexus‘ nearly unique soft navigation buttons out there already, with custom shortcuts, icons, colors and widgets. Their next trick is to add multiple widgets to a single icon, allowing users to quickly and easily adjust settings and playback from just about any app.

It works like this: you assign multiple widgets to a single navigation bar icon. When you’re done, tap the icon and the first widget shows up, popping into a UI Z-layer just above your current app. You can then swipe through a handful of widgets, no matter what they are. This isn’t ideal for a full-screen widget or smaller switches (which would be better placed in the status bar) but it’s perfect if you regularly use multiple music players, or want to embed dozens of quick links. Observe:

This feature is still a work in progress, but it should be included in either the next build of AOKP (build 38) or the one after that. The AOKP team hasn’t gone more than a couple of weeks between major builds yet, and they’re due for a new milestone sometime soon as well. We’ve made no secret of our appreciation of AOKP here on Android Community – check out our post from earlier this week on some of the things that Google should “borrow” from custom ROMs for the main Android source tree.

[via Droid-Life]