In the world of ultra-customizable build-your-own Android widgets, there are only a handful of options. UCCW (Ultimate Custom Widget) and Minimalistic Text are probably the most well-known. But the most powerful, the undisputed heavyweight champion of Android, is clearly Zooper.
Zooper is not one widget—it’s pretty much anything you can imagine. When you drag Zooper to your homescreen, an editor opens that lets you choose among some pre-installed templates, a blank slate, or any templates you’ve downloaded from the Google Play Store or saved to your SD card. Placing an existing template—like any of those in the screenshot below—takes just seconds. You can use Zooper without ever digging deeper, but when you finally enter the Zooper editor, the power of the application becomes apparent.
A single Zooper widget is made of modules. Modules can be text, rich text, shapes, a series (showing a sequence of days of the week, months of the year, etc), icon sets that change (based on pretty much anything), crazy progress bars that show battery level or the hour of the day with any colors or curvature, or just static images.
The app includes a massive number of available data fields and system variables that can be dynamically added to a module—everything from weather (current conditions and forecasts) to calendar information (next appointment time) and network data. Sunrise, sunset, moonrise, nautical twilight, moon illumination, Star Trek Stardate (seriously!), latitude, longitude, locality, current cellular operator, WiFi data traffic, cell data traffic, free memory, next alarm time, number of processes running, unread calls and emails, last time connected to a charger, battery temperature, battery voltage… I could go on and on. You can alter the font, text color, size, rotation, blur, alignment, case, etc. Conditionals let you change modules based on the day of the week, battery level (if friday and 17:00, print “I’m Out Of Here!”), or the moon phase.
With Tasker integration and other ingenious mods, the community has done amazing things to take Zooper even beyond this out-of-the box functionality. If you’ve never tried Zooper, you really should. If you’re an old pro, please join us in the Zooper forums here on XDA where you can discuss the app, ask questions, get support, or post your templates.
You can download Zooper Widget Pro and Zooper Widget Free from the Play store.
Marco at MyColorScreen put together a video to introduce XDA to Zooper. Have a look: