No story, but I just found knotwords and it’s pretty good.

I love widgets! Ugly as they are, I love to have a bunch of info at a glance, and most act like shortcuts too. I’m still rebuilding since everything got deleted, but from memory, I got widgets for gmail, whatsapp, todoist, keep, a few music and podcast players, tv time (a tv show episode tracker), toggl, feedly, and something google made called action blocks that let you make button widgets that run predefined actions with google assistant. And I’m sure I’m forgetting at least a handful.

I finally ended up going back to Nova too. There’s only one feature I’m missing from Microsoft Launcher, the feature that made me move from Nova to it in the first place, the scrollable wall of widgets. But I guess I’ll have to live without it.

The thing is that I use a bunch of screens, so I want to have some stuff at the left, some at the right.

The one thing that made me not use the Pixel launcher is that you can only add screens to the right. Even if you disable that stream of clickbait trash they want you to have on the left of your homescreen.

As a UI/UX designer myself (non-hobbyist), there’s UI and there’s UX. What differentiates a good-looking design from a crappy-looking design, most of all, is space (or padding). There are many other factors, of course, contrast being also very important for example, but space is number one. But that doesn’t make a design good, just good-looking, which is a very different thing.

Adding steps to take a common action (turn off wifi or whatever) because you used to have a certain number of buttons and now you have to hide some to add space… That’s bad design. Good looking, good UI. Shit UX.

Space should be added when needed. And you need it, when you do, to make thinks clearer. You shouldn’t add space to make it look better if that’s gonna make the experience worse.

The number one rule of design is that form follows function. You should make things as pretty as possible until you find the wall of functionality, and then you stop. Going from six quick access buttons to four was breaking that wall. You wanna be just on top of the wall. Go to one side, you get a great looking interface people hate to use. Go the other side, you get an interface that’s dense and full of things you want, but looks like a piece of nerd shit.

I’m also tired of people repeating the same copypasted ideas about any new design system out there (as I’m sure most people are when hearing people talk about their area of expertise), but they are not wrong on that regard when it comes to material you. Shit name by the way.