I would very much like to see a widget that allows me to put my name on the home screen. To identify my investment against any others. In a size customizable box with a variety of fonts.

Like name (20chars)
call my owner’s friend (provide alternate number to get phone back to owner)
or tap link for mailing address

Something like that.

I have a genius idea for you nEx..

Dual purpose widgets.
Hear me out.

My widget shows the speed limit, but during non-motion, I might as well display your MarketFeed.

We should create a dual purpose widget, one for moving, one for non-moving.

I see a lot of potential to capitalize on that precious desktop-real estate!

jp

We at KDB Technology are developing one right now that will sit on the homescreen and periodically update the feed as new stories are posted to it.

Fully customizable, and if you click on the current scrolling feed item, it will take you to the website content relating to that article.

We expect development/tesing to complete soon and launch in about 2 weeks.

The google search widgit seems to have supportted text entry since Android 1.0, doesn’t it?

Check out Twidgit Lite (Twitter Widget) in the android market.

It’s excellent

I like all of these ideas… they all would be great.

I think that many people will be disappointed with Widgets though, to be honest. Here’s why: There is a limited subset of UI elements which can be included in a Widget. Some of the important ones are missing, most notably the ListView, TableLayout, EditText, Spinner (AKA ComboBox). You can find the list of supported UI Elements here: http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/msg/a5247467151f5e3a

You also cannot derive an element from the supported elements. They must be the exact elements given in the listing linked above. That means you cannot add or handle events other than those provided under the AppWidget framework.

Basically, the only user inputs allowed under the AppWidget Framework are buttons and image buttons. Accordingly, the only events that seem to be available for capture within the Widget seem to be click events. In order to provide any real functionality, you have to resort to displaying a new window, at which point you might as well have just made a normal Application as opposed to an Widget. This is what I’ll have to do with the BarTor widget I mentioned before, pop a dialog or something that provides text input. At this point it might not even be worth it to do a Widget for this, as it doesn’t take long to just go into the application to do the search. The same would be true for a Wikipedia Widget. the Google Search Widget is integrated into the Launcher (Home), and does not use the AppWidget Framework which is why it can have an EditText element. I’m sure that at some point in the future the Android team will add new elements to the AppWidget framework, but until then we’ll have to work within the bounds of current framework or switch to one of the alternative home applications that provides it’s widget support. I have not used any of them so am not aware of what limitations they have on Widgets, but I’d imagine there are some major differences.

#3 (Control Panel) might be difficult given the new restrictions on apps changing settings directly.

I am working on at least one widget for the contest. I am working on a filterable Market feed. In addition to that one, I might do a BarTor widget to allow manual-searches to be initiated right from the home screen.

Why Wikipedia widget is not mentioned? :-)
I would also like to see an RSS feed widget directly on Android desktop.

Cheers!
Shonzilla