If you have been mesmerized by HD Widgets‘ beauty and power, be prepared to be enchanted even more. HD Widgets 4, the latest version of the popular widget generator, has just been released and it brings quite some heavy visual changes in a lot of places.
Perhaps the most conspicuous change would be found in the app itself and its weather screen. Developers Cloud.tv have done their best to update their designs to the latest Android guidelines and practices, something we’ll see again later. Gone is the bottom menu that is invoked by a menu button or whatnot. Now we have a side navigation panel that has become standard for many apps following the new Android design recommendations. The menu still has the same content, but now it’s organized in a more visually appealing way. The elements of the weather screen has also been moved around a bit to take advantage of “above the fold” viewing, putting the most important information available at first glance.
The widgets themselves have also been tweaked, though not exactly all for the better. HD Widgets now adopts a fixed constrained size format instead of the old expand-to-fill in order to still work beautifully on Samsung and HTC phones that use a rather unconventional grid system. Two new kinds of widgets have also been added due to popular request: location-based widgets and single-column widgets. Customizing widgets on landscape tablet devices now behave the same way as on a smartphone, with the preview on top and the options at the bottom.
Lastly, HD Widgets is giving its themes a refresh. Glass Gems, the default theme that comes with every HD Widgets install, got a bit of spring cleaning and adjusted to match Android 4.4 aesthetics. Colourform got a visual version bump and was made to follow Android Jelly Bean design rather than the previous Ice Cream Sandwich. The reason for this is the coming of Kairo, a completely new theme that was designed specifically with the flat, colorful, and vibrant personality of Android KitKat in mind. Sadly, Kairo is still unavailable for download.
Cloud.tv has pushed HD Widgets 4 to Google Play Store but, due to how Play Store updates work, it will take some time for the update to roll out to all HD Widgets users, probably a week at most. Of course, HD Widgets doesn’t come for free. The widget itself costs $1.99 while the Colouform theme has a $0.99 price tag. The developers are promising more news and changes to come once everyone has already been updated, so hang on to your seats because it looks like the best is yet to come.
Download: HD Widgets on Google Play Store
SOURCE: Cloud.tv
