Hate dull, static wallpaper? Now, thanks to Google which has unveiled yet another interesting and valuable application for Android, your home screen can now be transformed into a live widget.
On Tuesday, Google's Creative Lab released its newly created app Meter that turns the user's static wallpaper into a purposeful Material Design widget.
This app, which is free to download from Google Play, has the ability to display the Wi-Fi signal strength, remaining battery life, as well as number of pending notifications by using colorful geometric shapes.
"Turn your wallpaper into a live dashboard, displaying real-time statistics and information such as app usage, missed calls and battery level," reads the product description of the app.
Part of the Android Experiments project, the original idea and design for the live wallpaper comes from Mikkel Closer. Meanwhile, the code was given by Kyle Philips and Jonas Jongejan.
It is interesting to note that developers who wish to tweak the app to generate their own version of it can access the code on Github.
What is great with this live wallpaper is that it moves around, thanks to the accelerometer of the user's device.
As the device's battery discharges, a circle inside a larger circle shrinks. Once the Wi-Fi signal improves, the inverted triangle fills up. To show the notification count, the wallpaper shows floating bars inside a square. This doesn't provide the user, though, which type of notification they've missed.
Additionally, as the user wakes or locks the device, the wallpaper transitions between the three wallpaper choices.
In August, we reported that Google launched Android Experiments to showcase the innovative and imaginative things that developers are working on with the Android operating system.
The first 19 experiments showcased in the gallery were all open source and obtainable from the Google Play store.
"Our hope is to encourage more developers to challenge how we interact with the devices we use every day," reads the description of the gallery.
Any developer can send their very own experiment using a form on the Android Experiments website. Experiments should run on Android 4.4 (KitKat) or higher.
