As a part of the challenge from last week, I asked you to try to have Zooper Widget display an indicator of when your headphones have been plugged in. To do this, we must utilize the second function available in the Tasker/Zooper Widget integration options – we must pull system info from Tasker to ‘display’ on a Zooper Widget.

If you are starting here, I urge you to head back to our previous posts to learn how to design Zooper Widgets and how to make Zooper Widget trigger Tasker Tasks.

Although today’s tutorial will be a great example of how to integrate Tasker and Zooper Widget, please be aware that we will only get around to some text manipulation today, you’ll need to check back next week for Zooper Widget Advanced Parameters to be able to complete the full task of getting an icon to appear and disappear for our control panel.

I know what you’re thinking, there are so many aspects of system information that Zooper Widget can already access, why would I bother integrating Tasker? The simple truth is that for most basic system info you are correct, collecting the info from within Zooper Widget itself is the fastest and most efficient method. What Tasker can do for Zooper Widget is act upon system changes/states that Zooper Widget cannot read. For example, our example will utilize Tasker to identify when you have plugged in your headphones and fire that info over to Zooper Widget to display.

First, create the Task in Tasker

Open Tasker and navigate to the Tasks list.

Tap the “+” symbol in the very bottom right corner to add a new task.

Name your new Task concisely. I will name mine “ZooperHeadphonesIn”

In the Task Edit screen, tap “+” once again to add actions.

Choose Plugin.

Choose Zooper Widget Pro Variable.

Tap the pencil ‘edit’ icon to the right of Configuration.

Following the on-screen instructions, you will enter two items:

ZW Variable: create a unique and concise variable name, I will call mine “ZHEADPHONESTATE”
ZW Text: you may enter custom text, or enter either Zooper Widget or Tasker codes. For now, let’s just add our own text, something simple like “Headphones in” is good.

You will need to remember both of these values when we get back to Zooper Widget. They are case sensitive as well, so be sure to name them carefully, and even consider writing them down until we are done. Also, for our initial setup, the ZW Text value will be displayed on our widget.

Tap Save in the top right of the screen

Return to the main screens of Tasker by tapping the system back button.

Create the Profile in Tasker to trigger the Task

Swipe or tap over to Profiles

Tap the “+” icon to add a profile.

Choose State.

Choose Hardware.

Choose Headset Plugged.

You may change up Type to handle differing headphone types, I shall leave mine as Any, then tap the system back button.

You are now asked to choose your Tasker Task, mine was called “ZooperheadphonesIn”

Tap the system back button until you return to the Homescreen. We’ll now have to go into Zooper Widget to act upon the Tasker settings.

Assign a Tasker Variable to a Zooper Widget element

Navigate into the Layout mode of your Zooper Widget widget.

Tap “+ADD” to add a new element and choose Text.

Choose Edit text manually.

Clear the default time text.

We will now enter the ZW Variable we setup in Tasker. You can choose the Tasker section and tap #T…” to get started, or simply type the code manually. For my example, the code will be #TZHEADPHONESTATE#. Notice how that combines the Zooper Widget code #T…# with the variable name we gave in Tasker.

Tap OK in the top right of the screen to save.

Tap the system back button to return to the Homescreen.

As you will see, the text on your widget element will now change to your ZW Text value, mine was “Headphones in,” when you plug in your headphones. This is a one time change, we now need to create another Task to change the text to “Headphones out” to get the full effect.

First, create the Task in Tasker

Following the same steps as above, we will create a nearly identical Task.

This time around simply change up the values as follows:

Name your new Task similar to before. I will name mine “ZooperHeadphonesOut”

ZW Variable: use the exact same variable name as before, mine was “ZHEADPHONESTATE”
ZW Text: add your new custom text, “Headphones out” is good.

Update existing Tasker profile with an Exit Task

Find your created Profile in the Profiles section of Tasker.

Long press on the Task within the profile. In our case, the Task is called “ZooperHeadphonesIn”

Choose Add Exit Task.

Select your new Task, mine is called “ZooperHeadphonesOut”

Tap the system back button until you return to the Homescreen.

That is all, go ahead and test it out. What do you think? It is pretty rudimentary as plain text, so we’ll go ahead next week and use the Advanced Parameters in Zooper Widget to make an icon appear and disappear when headphones are plugged in and removed.

Using Advanced Parameters in Zooper Widget

Taking Zooper Widget to the next level, Advanced Parameters add functionality that we haven’t begun to imagine in these articles just yet. We could, for example, rotate a Rect element in order to simulate the hands of an analogue clock. You could lump a bunch of parameters together to change the main image in a widget based on the weather, time of day and your Lat and Long. The sky is the limit, I do hope that you check back in next week to learn some of the basics and then go ahead and enjoy designing your own widgets.

Tasker

We briefly stepped into the world of Tasker during our time today, I encourage you to join me in a couple weeks when we will be going a little deeper into Tasker. As mentioned, we have already covered some of the basics, so we’ll work from there and get right into building our own tools. Buckle in, Tasker makes Zooper Widget look like a one trick pony.

How did it go today? I am eager to see what imaginative designs many of you came up with for your custom built control panels, please do share in the comments below. Do also share your additional insights and comments on the process, we already know there are multiple paths to get to this same end point in Zooper Widget, is there a road that you have taken that was a little easier?

This is it guys, over the last few weeks we have built a custom control panel widget using Zooper Widget and Tasker, today we add the final touch and learn about Zooper Widget Advanced parameters.

The final touch to our control panel is to manipulate an image in Zooper Widget so that it only appears when you have headphones plugged into your device. This task requires the Tasker code with ZW Variables created last week, head back there to check it all out, if needed, before you continue here today. Head back to our de facto ultimate Zooper Widget design guide for a reminder on how to input an image into your Zooper Widget design. Once you have an image in place, to be used as our ‘headphones in’ icon, you are ready to proceed.

If you had followed along the instructions from the last two weeks, this is going to be fairly simple. Just make sure you have a Bitmap image setup in your Zooper Widget that will act as your notification icon.

Head into the Layout section of your Zooper Widget and tap in to edit your Bitmap image element.

Select Advanced Parameters at the very bottom.

We have options once again, you may use the dropdown selections to build your advanced parameters, or simply type them out. Also, we must choose the best method to hide our Bitmap image element. We could change the X and/or Y Offset values to move the Bitmap way off the screen or we could change the opacity (alpha) value to make it completely transparent. My personal preference is to change the scaling percentage (size) of the Bitmap element to 0, this way I know where it is and it is practically impossible to hit should I decide to give it its own Tap action.

Please note that the folks behind Zooper Widget recommend changing the X or Y Offsets, as moving the element takes less processing time than re-drawing it, as needs to happen when the transparency or size changes.For our application of indicating headphone status, I can accept the fraction of a second delay, if you find the delay unreasonable, try changing the X Offset to 10,000 to make the image ‘disappear.’

My Advanced Parameters string looks like this: $#TZHEADPHONESTATE#=Headphones in?[s]70[/s]:[s]0[/s]$

Let us break that down: The opening and closing “$” indicate that this is what we call an ‘IF’ statement. So, IF the value of our ZW Variable in Tasker, which I called “ZHEADPHONESTATE,” equals the text “Headphones in” ? Then assign our Bitmap to scale 70 : else, assign the bitmap to scale 0. (You will have to play with the scale size for your own design to make the icon fit your control panel.)

Tap OK in the top right of the screen to save changes.

Tap the system back button to return to the Homescreen.

You’ve done it. Like I said, with the previous work in place, Advanced Parameters are pretty easy to implement. Don’t get me wrong, they can be extremely complicated in terms of what you make them do, but the procedure is pretty simple.

Did you get how the Advanced Parameters worked? As another example, skipping the Tasker integration, you could try having the icon pop up when the battery level goes below 20%. The Advanced Parameters string would look like: $#BLEV#<20?[s]100[/s]:[s]0[/s]$

Note that you can use most typical mathematical operators, such as <  >  =  >=  or  <=. Also, use != for ‘not equal’.

Always keep in mind the format of the IF statement and you’ll never go wrong. In plain english, “IF comparison is true, do this, else do that.” In pseudo code – $Comparison?Do this if True:do that if False$ So, if #BLEV# (battery level) is less than 20, change Bitmap to full size, [s]100[/s], but if battery level is not less than 20, change the Bitmap to size 0, [s]0[/s], since we want the image to only show up when the battery is low.

I urge you to go ahead and try out the Advanced Parameters for a bunch of other stuff. Try popping up a notification icon when there is an Alarm set, your battery is overheating, your internal storage is getting low, your WiFi speed is unreasonably slow, you have a calendar event within the next hour, a SMS or email has arrived, you missed a call, it’s your mother’s birthday and many, many more.

Taking it to the next level, you would use the Advanced Parameters to rotate a Rect element in order to simulate the hands of an analogue clock. You could even lump a bunch together to change the main image in a widget based on the weather, time of day and your Lat and Long. The sky is the limit, I do hope that you enjoy designing your own widgets.

It took a few weeks, but we have finally worked our way through what was little more than an introduction to Zooper Widget. We’d be happy to see your efforts, hear your outcome stories and more, go ahead and share in the comments below. With the tools in these tutorials, you’ll be able to push forward to build any design with Zooper Widget, and load it with function by linking it to Tasker. If you have any specific request, submit those too, we can hopefully run a tutorial for it one day as well.

Tasker

We briefly stepped into the world of Tasker during the process of building this custom control panel widget, I encourage you to join me next week when we will be going a little deeper into Tasker. As mentioned, we have already covered some of the basics, so we’ll work from there and get right into building our own tools. Buckle in, Zooper Widget is great for design, but Tasker rocks system functionality like no other.

Last week on our Android customization series we took a look at how to manage your keyboard on your Android device. Then, Joe came along and shared the 15 best keyboards for Android. Obviously, we want you to embrace your customization abilities on your device.

This week, I had suggested we might start talking about managing Location settings as a means to reduce battery consumption on your device. I must change gears and save Location settings for another time. I have been asked to take a quick look at how to change colors of elements and manage other notifications through Zooper Widget.

Today, we will try to keep it simple, I will show you how to change the color of a battery indicator based on the power status of your device.

Before we get started

You will be able to follow along today with just the free version of Zooper Widget from the Google Play Store, but do keep in mind that there are limitations and you’ll need to dish out $2.49 for Zooper Widget Pro if you wish to take things to the next level.

Now that you have Zooper Widget installed, create a widget that includes a battery indicator. If you are unsure how to do this, head back to one of our previous Zooper Widget tutorials. You might start with our full guide to all things Zooper Widget, or just take a look at the clock widget that kicked off our entire Android customization series.

Before we do any work, let’s look specifically at what we are doing here today. I have a Zooper Widget setup on my Homescreen that has my battery level as a number. For today, I’ve added an icon too, just for effect. Normally, the battery icon is white. From there, I want two things:

1. When my battery level drops below 15%, make the battery icon change to the color red
2. When I plug in the charger, I want the battery icon to turn green

Let’s get started

Head into your battery element of your Zooper Widget.

Scroll all the way to the bottom and tap on Advanced Parameters.

I am sure you followed along our previous Zooper Widget Advanced Parameters tutorial, so you are somewhat comfortable with what you are looking at here.

Let’s organize our logic, we want the battery indicator to be white normally, red if battery is low and green when charging. There are a few ways to create the string for your Advanced Parameter, we previously looked at using the IF statement layout, so let’s do that again.

As a refresher, the IF statement in Zooper Widget looks like this: $X=Y?Z:W$ In plain English, that is: IF this equals that, then do this, or else, do that.

We have need for two IF statements today, and we will need to nest them to get our desired results. When nesting IF statements, it is sometimes best to start from the end, let’s do that, starting with the green power indicator.

$#BSTATN#=2?[c]00FF00[/c]:[c]FFFFFF[/c]$

IF Battery Status = Charging, then make icon color green, else leave it white.

Now we create the red color for when the power is below 15%.

$#BLEVN#<15?[c]FF0000[/c]:[c]FFFFFF[/c]$

IF battery Level is less than 15, then make the icon color red, else leave it white.

Now comes the tricky part, nesting these IF statements together. I will just give you the string, then we’ll look at what happened.

$#BSTATN#=2?[c]00FF00[/c]:$$#BLEVN#<15?[c]FF0000[/c]:[c]FFFFFF[/c]$

Basically, what I have done here is tell Zooper that if the phone is plugged in, make it green, else, if it’s not plugged in, check to see the battery level and make it white or red as needed. The double $$ is required to signify that a nested IF statement is to be evaluated. Finally, by having the very last result set as white (FFFFFF), I was able to eliminate the duplicate [c]FFFFFF[/c] entry.

Hit the checkmark in the top right corner to save your Advanced Parameter.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit all the way to the Homescreen. Give your new widget a go.

What’s next

I am certain that was a little much to grasp the first time through, however, I want to throw a few more things at you. First, let’s look at color values, then let’s look at alternative configurations.

Throughout all of the Android customization tutorials you have worked through with us, I have represented colors in full Hex form. That is the strings of six digits with characters ranging from 0 to F. Today we used FFFFFF (white), FF0000 (red), and 00FF00 (green). For each of these, we could have used a shorthand, which would be FFF, F00, 0F0.

The art of nesting IF statements is not the most efficient nor necessarily easiest to explain after the fact. Zooper Widget takes Advanced Parameters to a whole new level with alternative string methods. We don’t have the time to look at that in detail today, so I’ll just throw an example at you:

The following string was taken straight from the Zooper.org archives and will make it so that your battery icon is red when your power is below 10%, yellow when your power is 10%-20% and green when your power is greater than 20%.

[c=$#BLEVN#<=10?F00$$#BLEVN#>10 && #BLEVN#<20?FF0$$#BLEVN# >= 20?0F0$]#BLEV#[/c]

Next week

We will continue to look at battery saving techniques and technologies as our Android customization series continues. We plan to revisit the Location services topic, but must warn you, recent versions of Android offer rather limited automation functionality around Location services. We have a bit of a clunky workaround, but we’ll eventually have to take root actions to get things as smooth as can be.

Any Zooper Widget users out there care to suggest a cleaner solution to changing battery indicator colors?

Over the last few weeks our Android customization series has provided some great ideas and tricks to manage and reduce power consumption. We would like to take a little break from battery life tools this week to focus on the weather.

With it being that time of year for us northerners, leaves are beginning to turn brown and the weather is beginning to cool down. Now may be a great time prepare for bad weather days by creating a little weather warning system right on your Android device Homescreen.

Chances are, if you’re still reading this, you are interested enough in your weather that you already have a weather widget on your device. And if you’ve been following our customization series, you may even already use Zooper Widget. If this describes you, then you already have the hard part complete and ready to roll today.

Before we get started

You will need Zooper Widget installed on your Android device. The free version will get you by, but if you’ve been testing out all of these Zooper Widget projects, you may have already invested your $2.49 for Zooper Widget Pro in the Google Play Store.

Before proceeding, I will leave it to you to create your own Zooper Widget with a weather indicator. We’ve walked through this before, but you’ll likely want at least the weather scalable icon set in your widget.

We’re going to try to keep it simple, all I want to do is adjust a weather icon to reflect upcoming problematic weather. Specifically, what I want is for my weather icon/indicator to turn red and/or change size if unfavorable weather is headed my way.

This is a modified approach to the techniques we looked at to change the color of your battery indicator based on power level from a while back. That should make this pretty easy. Let’s do this in order, from the beginning:

Create your widget.

Add a weather icon or text element with the weather.

Head to the Advanced parameters section of your weather indicator.

Now, enter only one of the following code snippets, for now. You can come back to mix and match to create your own custom super tool later:

When today’s temperature is to be below 40F, change the indicator blue:
$#W0TEMPN#<40?[c]00F[/c]:[c]FFF[/c]$

When there is snow in the forecast, change the indicator red, and enlarge it:
$#W0COND#=snow?[c]F00[/c][s]60[/s]:[c]FFF[/c][s]30[/s]$
(This assumes that your weather indicator has a default size of 30, thus a size of 60 is a major increase. You will need to identify the default size of your indicator and adjust accordingly.)

Too easy so far? Let’s step it up – When the weather condition is going to be severe today, like a thunderstorm or snow, we’ll do something drastic, like still just changing the indicator to red.
$#W0CODE#>=1&&#W0CODE#<3||#W0CODE#=8?[c]F00[/c]:[c]FFF[/c]$

What is going on here?

I best break that down a bit. #W0COND# breaks into W=weather, 0=today (alternatively, C=current, 1=tomorrow, etc) and CODE=is a weather condition code. All available condition codes can be found here but may act differently depending on your set default weather provider. I have chosen to work with Yahoo! as my provider, you may find that either Open Weather Map (which is the usual default) or Yr.no works better in your area. Change that up in your default Zooper Widget settings.

Back to that string of code, you’ll see I used “&&” and “||” which indicate AND and OR, respectively. So, what we really said up there was ‘if the weather code is greater than or equal to 1 AND below 3, OR it is exactly 8, change the color.’ You’ll have to run through that list of weather codes to decide what you want to check for.

Now that that is all over, be sure to hit the check mark in the top right corner of the screen to save and exit. Then hit the system Back button to save and exit right out of Zooper Widget.

What’s next?

Please do not be discouraged if things are not quite right the first time around. You will have to play with this to see what works best for you. Myself, I tweak and modify my code almost monthly, and at the very least, adapt to the season with more controls for snow and cold during the winter and granular checks for high temps in the summer.

This project started off sounding fairly simple, but revealed some very detailed and complicated techniques, leaving you with tons of options and lots to think about. When you get the hang of what you see here, try combining the weather attributes so that you can adjust your weather icon to account for temperatures, conditions and even humidity levels and wind speeds. You can then still change colors and sizes of elements, but you could also use a dedicated warning icon or text that moves into view when the time is right.

Lastly, and we won’t get into this, don’t forget that Zooper Widget plays nice with Tasker.

Next week

As we close out a topic about notifications of one sort in our Android customization series, I’d like to start looking at notifications in general on your Android device. We’ll begin a multi-part series on handling notifications, partially inspired by what is to come from Android L, and partially inspired by apps that attempt to duplicate that Android L functionality, like HeadsUp!

What do you think about our little weather warning system – I do hope you never see it activated for severe weather, but let us know how it goes and what modifications you have done to make it better?

I am looking out the window at this very moment, it is windy and raining hard. I was able to prepare for it though because my weather warning system built using Zooper Widget in last week’s Android customization series notified me. Speaking of notifications, today we want to step up the notification game, building our own tools, like usual.

Just after Android Lollipop was announced (as Android L) at Google I/O back in June, we took a look at an app that attempted to duplicate the new floating notifications that Android L revealed. The app was called Heads Up! and is now one of many that attempted to bring to you then what Android L promised for later.

Here’s the thing, Heads Up! didn’t work very well for me. Functionally, there were no errors to speak of, I just wanted more control over the notification and didn’t care for the presentation. Most of all, once a notification faded out of the screen, that was it, gone forever. As always, I turned to Tasker to see what I could do for myself. Guess what, the results were exactly what I wanted, and so I shall share my project with you.

Even with Android Lollipop being announced just yesterday, it is still a ways out and we want something today.

Before we begin

On your Android 4.0 or higher device, we’ll need Tasker installed for today’s project. Tasker is still $2.49 in the Google Play Store.

This project is actually much larger than I can rightly squeeze into a single post. In all, we will look at several projects over the coming weeks. Starting today, we’ll collect notifications and display them through a pop up using Tasker itself. From there, we will look at providing a custom notification count using Zooper Widget, we will combine the two, and we may just dive into Tasker Scenes, if the selection of notification options doesn’t yet feel complete.

I’ll leave it to you to head back to previous Tasker projects for a reminder on how to get Tasker up and running. Fire up a new Task, I’ll call mine “BasicNotify“, then add the following action:

Select Alert.

Select Flash.

Tap the labels/tags icon to the right of Text.

Scroll down and choose Notification Title, or just type in %NTITLE on the Text line.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit out of the Task.

Fire up your Tasker Profile, I called mine “GetAllNotifications” and add the following:

Choose Event.

Choose UI.

Choose Notification.

Tap the little spaceship icon to the right of Owner Application.

In the bottom right, tap All.

Tap the system Back button to save the app selection, then tap it again to save the Profile event.

Choose your notification Task from earlier, mine was called “BasicNotify.”

Tap the system Back button when you are done to save and exit out of Tasker. Project complete.

What’s next

Now comes the waiting game, but the next time a notification comes in to your system, any notification, it will pop up in a semi-transparent, non-actionable, flash notification on your screen. It’ll hang out for a few seconds before going away. It really does not do that much, but these are the basics we need to take the project to the next level.

There are very few options to mess with on this one, but do play around with it if you desire. We will eventually dive into creating custom Scenes using Tasker, which will let you create exactly the popup that you desire. Again, feel free to poke around with Scenes, but I’ve got some better stuff on deck for you before I get there.

Bonus: How to view history of all Notifications

Typically, once a notification is swiped away or tapped, it is up to your memory to figure out what that notification said, if you even happened to see it in the first place. Did you know there is a way to view all recent notifications? Just find an empty 1×1 space on your homescreen and start the process to add a shortcut. Under Shortcuts, look for Settings Shortcuts, then simply choose Notifications. You can’t do much with the list, and it is not very informative, but I am sure you’ll find a use for it.

Next week

As mentioned, this is just the basic starter to creating a custom notification tool that you will eventually use to make stock Android L users jealous. Don’t get me wrong, the Android L floating notification looks very cool, and will be quite functional, but that is not going to stop us from taking things to the next level in our Android customization series. Specifically, next week we’d like to look at using Zooper Widget to build an SMS and Gmail notification counter.

I know it’s pretty basic, but what do you say, is this simple little notification popup making things better for you?

Continuing with notification management tools in our Android customization series, we will be using Zooper Widget today to build a simple Gmail and SMS counter for your Homescreen.

Last week, we took to notification management by using Tasker to popup a simple read-only alert for all incoming notifications to your device. Today’s approach works great along side the notification popup, adding a counter of specific notification types.

Zooper Widget is capable of handling a few messaging tasks, but has made it really simple to add Gmail and SMS counters to your custom widget. We will start with these two service today, then we’ll expand on the project next time, to include any app or service you have installed on your device.

Before we get started

You will need Zooper Widget installed on your device for today’s project. Zooper Widget free will work, but again, it has limitations. You may consider dropping the $2.49 in the Google Play Store for Zooper Widget Pro if you wish to implement everything as we will in this project.

A little background before we get started: I am going to show off today’s project in several different ways, but I will only cover the new material once. You may need to head back to previous Zooper Widget tutorials to get an idea how you might handle each of the examples and what elements are available to you.

My primary Gmail widget is the basic gmail app icon, when a new message arrives, an additional image and text pops onto the screen. The other examples will include pure text, the boring old red dot counter and simply having the letter “G” popup when the time is right. Again, these are all near identical, just a touch of different code in the Advanced Parameters.

Set up your base widget, for my personal usage, I have the app icon as the main element in my widget, it is clickable into Gmail itself, and I was sure to leave empty space within the actual widget area for both the pop up notification and as my way to click into the Zooper Widget setup screens.

There are two elements that are to be adjusted, the little popup image or red dot and the text counter.

For this, let us use the red dot example. I would have used my actual bitmap image popup as example, but I do not have permission to share the icons I’ve used (3K SR Black icon set.)

Again, I will leave it to you to design the widget, create your dot, or image, then size and position it appropriately. Take note of the X Offset value. We did this stuff back in this Zooper Widget tutorial, if you need help.

Now, create your text element, manually change it to a value like 10 for now so you can size and position it appropriately.

Once everything is looking good from a design perspective, we’ll go into the advanced stuff, as follows:

You remember your X Offset value from above, right? Good. Head on into your Red Dot.

Scroll to the bottom and enter Advanced Parameters.

Enter the following code:

$#SUG#>0?[ox]20[/ox]:[ox]10000[/ox]$
Replace “20” with your X Offset Value.

Tap the checkmark in the top right to save and exit Advanced Parameters.

Tap the system Back button to exit back to the Module Manager.

Head into your Text element.

Scroll down a short ways and tap into Edit text manually.

Enter the following code:

$#SUG#>0?#SUG#: $

Tap the checkmark in the top right to save and exit the text editor.

Tap the system Back button to exit all the way out of Zooper Widget. That’s right, project complete.

What happened up there?

If you followed along previous Zooper Widget tutorials that worked with Advanced Parameters, including the Weather Warning system from a couple weeks back, then you might be able to guess your way through this one.

Once again, we utilized the IF statement for our string. #SUG# is the check for messages in your first Gmail account inbox. If you wish to see more options on that one, #SUG# and related live within the System section of Advanced Parameters. The only other new trick here is the blank text at the end of the Text element string – #SUG#: $ With the space ” ” after the colon, Zooper knowns to put nothing on screen.

As pseudo english, for the Red Dot we said IF Gmail message count is greater than 0 THEN position the red dot in view, ELSE position it ten thousand pixels off the screen. For the text string, IF Gmail message count is greater than 0 THEN show the message count, ELSE show nothing. I hope that made sense.

This is going to possibly be one of the shortest step-by-step tutorials that I ever write:

Using the same steps and code as in the Gmail tutorials above, change just one small thing – use Advanced code #SUSMS# instead of Gmail’s #SUG#. That is it, the SMS counter is pretty simple, once you’ve gone through the Gmail one.

What’s next

Now that you’ve got the hang of things here, go ahead and adjust the basic code above to work for the other Zooper Widget elements that you might like to use. I showed off the letter “G” popping up on screen, I assume you might want that embedded into another widget on your screen instead of a dedicated widget. Don’t be afraid to play with it and show off what you come up with.

You may also desire to tackle notifications for other services on your device. Although there are things that can be done within Zooper Widget alone, I have never bothered trying. Instead, I find that Tasker adds that extra functionality and customization. What do you know, we will be doing just that next week.

Next Week

Gmail and SMS are a great start, but there are plenty of other messaging services that most of use. Next week on our Android customization series, we’ll take today’s tutorial to a whole new level. Utilizing Tasker, we’ll show you how to collect notifications from any app and display a counter on your Zooper Widget. By request, this will dive into Variables – that’s you Waterdroid – for both Tasker and Zooper Widget. Bring your thinking caps, it’s going to be a big one.

That is two rather simple projects in a row, don’t worry, they both lead into the big one for next week.

Any ideas on improving this project? Please show off your creations in the comments below, we love to see what you come up with.

If you’ve been following along the last couple Android customization tutorials, you’ve seen how to collect incoming notifications and pop them up as a simple flash over your screen using Tasker. You’ve also seen how to put a custom Gmail and SMS count/indicator on your Homescreen through Zooper Widget. No better time then to marry the two and put any and all notifications on the Homescreen.

The idea is simple enough, we collect notifications using Tasker, based on the principles learned a couple weeks back. Then we take action on them by displaying a counter on the Homescreen using Zooper Widget, similar to how we used Gmail and SMS last week. This project will require that we utilize variables within both apps and have Tasker and Zooper Widget work together, like we’ve done in the past.

If you haven’t gathered yet, today’s project accomplishes something pretty solid by pulling together bits and pieces of our previous work. If this were a TV show, it would be one of those recap episodes that spends its time replaying past scenes to tell a new story.

Before we get started

You will require two pieces of software today, Tasker is $2.99 in the Google Play Store and Zooper Widget Pro is $2.49 in the Google Play Store.

TaskerZooper Widget

If this is your first time out, you might be thinking that five bucks is pretty expensive to tackle this simple project, and I would completely agree. However, I would urge you to check out all of the other great things that Tasker and Zooper Widget can do. Coming from a guy that cannot justify spending even a penny on in-app purchases for games, I have had no regrets whatsoever on purchasing these two apps, and I got in when Tasker was $7.

First and foremost, please understand that we will be working off of collected incoming notifications to your Android device. This project does not connect to your various services and is not designed to be a full service notification tool, it is designed simply to display an indicator that a notification has arrived for a given app, without regard to what that notification should be.

Today’s example will work from the familiar designs we started with last week. I will focus on the Google+ app, but the same steps apply to absolutely every app on your device.

Let’s talk this through before we dive into the code.

First, you will need to create a Zooper Widget for this project. Perhaps you already have a widget, like a clock, that you would like to just add a tiny counter on the side, or maybe you want a full dedicated widget, the choice is yours.

Once the widget is setup, we collect the notifications, store their count as a variable in both Tasker and Zooper Widget, then act on those variables by displaying an indicator, or the count itself on your widget. With that out of the way, we will require cleanup tasks, basically, we must decide when to return the variables and counter back to zero.

Please follow along last week’s tutorial to create your Zooper Widget on your Homescreen. You won’t need to enter the Advanced Parameter code from last week, just the design of your widget.

Take a quick look through the Tasker project we did two weeks ago, at that time, we collected all incoming notifications and flashed them to screen. This time around we will be a little bit more picky, collecting only notifications from a single app and storing them in a variable.

We will create a simple Tasker Task with just two actions. Start your Task and give it an appropriate name, I will call mine “GooglePlusNotification.”

Tap the “+” bottom to add an action.

Select Variables.

Select Variable Set.

In the Name field, enter a unique and concise variable name for within Tasker, preceded by the % symbol. I will call mine “%GPN“.

Special note: it is crucial that you consider your use-case when creating variables in Tasker. A full uppercase variable name designates it a global variable, accessible by other aspects of Tasker. If you include even a single lowercase character, the variable will be locked in scope to only operate within this particular Tasker Task. This can be an invaluable advantage for some projects, but will prevent our project today from operating. If in doubt, use all uppercase characters.

In the To field, we want to incrementally increase the value of the variable, so you will enter “your variable name + 1”. So, mine looks like “%GPN + 1“.

Finally, we’ll need that to evaluate, so check the box beside Do Maths.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

Now we create action two in this Task.

Tap the “+” button to add our second action.

Select Plugin.

Select Zooper Widget Pro.

Tap the pencil icon in the top right, beside Configure.

In the ZW Variable field, enter a unique and concise variable name for Zooper Widget, I will risk confusing myself by simply calling mine “GPN“.

In the ZW Text field, we want to assign the value of the matching Tasker variable, enter your Tasker variable name, mine was called “%GPN“.

Tap the save icon at the bottom of the screen.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit out of the action, then out of the Tasker Task. We are finished here.

I know you have now looked back over our Android customization post from two weeks prior to this one, where we collected all incoming notifications. This is very similar, with just a couple minor changes.

Start your Tasker Profile, if asked, give it an appropriate name, I’ll be calling mine “NotificationGoogle+“.

Select Event.

Select UI.

Select Notification.

Tap the rocket ship to choose an Owner Application.

Select Google+, or whichever app you are building your project for.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

Choose your Tasker Task, you’ll recall I had named mine “GooglePlusNotification.”

Tap your system Back button once again to save and exit right out of Tasker. We will now head to Zooper Widget and collect the variable to work with.

Open up your Zooper Widget that you created above, head into the element that you wish to use to display or change based on the incoming notifications and head into the Advanced Parameters section.

If you are moving an element on and off of the screen, such as the red dot in our example last week, you would use that exact same code, simply swapping out your manually created variable name for the embedded Gmail variable in Zooper Widget. That code will look something like this:

$#TGPN#!=0?[ox]0[/ox]:[ox]10000[/ox]$

Did you get what happened there? The way Zooper Widget understands that you are receiving the variable from Tasker is by using the format #T…#. Expanding this, you see that I’ve inserted my manually created ZW Variable from above, “GPN.” (Not to be confused with the Tasker variable %GPN.) So you will enter #TYOURVARIABLE#, or #TGPN#, and be certain to maintain case sensitivity.

Tap the checkmark to save and exit.

In my example, I am also using a Text element, take the time to modify the code to operate with whichever setup you desire. If you need examples, you could check out our weather warning system from a while back, in which we look at changing element colors, sizes and more.

For our Text element, your code would look something like:

$#TGPN#=0? :#TGPN#$

Remember that the ” ” space will display as nothing on the front end and that your custom variable is used in place of the built-in variables of Zooper Widget.

Tap the checkmark to save and exit, then exit your way out of Zooper Widget. The first stages are complete.

Your notification indicator should be fully operational in terms of letting you know that something has arrived. You’ll quickly notice that it simply adds 1 every time something new arrives and it quickly keeps adding up out of control. We need to find a time to head back into Tasker to reset the variables to 0.

Pro Tip: Take the time now to fine tune your design and layout while the elements are visible on screen.

We will basically require a full new Tasker project to proceed. It will be simple enough to create, but deciding when to use it will be critical to your experience. First things first, we will create a Task that resets the variables. After that, we will create multiple Profiles that trigger the reset.

Create your new Tasker Task and name it appropriately. I have called mine “GooglePlusClearNotify“.

You will almost entirely duplicate everything you did in your “GooglePlusNotification” Task above, this time, instead of your Tasker -> Variable Set -> To being %GPN + 1, it will simply be 0.

Again, assign your ZW Variable to be your Tasker variable, or simple assign it the value 0 as well. Either will do in this scenario.

Tap the Task run button, which looks like a typical normal music play button, the triangle in the bottom of the screen. You won’t notice much here, but when you now tap your system Back button to save and exit all the way out to your Homescreen, you should see that Zooper Widget has reset back to your default 0 notifications state.

Now, we must decide when to run the reset Task above. I have decided to run it every time that I either enter or exit the Google+ app. You may also wish to run the reset Task when a Google+ system notification is clicked, on a timed schedule, at the start of calendar events (clear screen for a meeting) and more.

Trigger reset Task when app opens and closes

Create a new Tasker Profile and give it an appropriate name. You know the drill.

Select Application.

Select Google+, or whichever app you are building on today.

Select your reset Task, mine was called “GooglePlusClearNotify.”

Long press the Task and choose Add Exit Task. Once again, choose your reset Task.

What happens now is that your variable, and therefore Zooper Widget indicator, will change back to zero when you enter Google+. Then, if you receive any new notifications while you are in there, it all gets reset back to 0 again when you exit Google+. The idea is to have a blank slate when you put the app away.

The exit task is much more useful if you are building for an app like the Google Play Store, within which it is fairly common to trigger new notifications by installing or updating other apps.

What’s Next

After using things as described for a short while, you will begin to see another disadvantage of simply acting upon collected incoming system notifications. You will find that checking your messages on a different device will not trigger the notification count to reset on this device.

I will now pull you into the mix, please share with the class if you identify a method of clearing our notification counts across devices. Until then, what I have done is to create a dedicated Tasker Task that manually clears all of my variables, resetting all of my notification counts for all of my custom indicators. The code is identical to the reset Task above, except that this single Task includes a version of those two actions for each variable and Zooper Widget I have running.

Next Week

I think you’ve have enough of handling notifications in our Android customization series, at least for a bit. Besides, Android 5.0 Lollipop is set to start shipping to devices, or at least on the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, before we see each other next. While we take the time to work through Lollipop and its new notification tools, let us look at something else next Thursday.

By request, we would like to revisit Zooper Widget to look specifically at moving objects based on variables. Perhaps the most common implementation of this is in designing a functional analog clock. While a rotating clock is not too hard, if you know your math, we’ll take it a little simpler with an autumn inspired project. Our goal will be to hide functionality behind a touch of class and style, and take another leap forward in Zooper Widget Advanced Parameters.

That was a long one, how did it go for you? Anyone willing to show off their handy work in the comments below?

Did you follow along our Android customization series last week? If you did, you got to walk through building your very own completely custom notification counter for any app right on your Homescreen. This week, as promised, we will look at moving objects around a Zooper Widget based on variables and system settings.

The goal today is to help you disguise things, like your battery level or the outside temperature, behind graphical elements. We will work off of my autumn widget with the falling leaves. I will show you how to move one leaf, you’ll get to apply your new skills to handle the rest.

Before we get started

You will require Zooper Widget for your project today. As always, you can head into the Google Play Store and grab the free version of Zooper Widget. For those that find the few limitations of the free version to be a bother, Zooper Widget Pro is $2.49 in the Google Play Store.

To give you an idea what we are looking at here, I am working from the circular widget that I walked you through in our full Zooper Widget beginner’s guide. You do not need to do all of this work, but you will need to know what the Bitmap element is and how to work some of the basics.

To get started, you’ll want to create your Zooper Widget on your Homescreen and include your image as a Bitmap element. Be sure to size it as needed and then position it in your starting position for your movement. As you’ve seen, I have my tree as a background image, then I’ve positioned my leaves to sit at the top of the element.

As you have seen before, there are many variables built into Zooper Widget that you can work off of. Of course, you can also pull in info from Tasker, but we’ll not address that again today.

With your bitmap element in place, take note of the starting position X Offset and Y Offset position.

Move your bitmap element to your finish position and again take note of the X Offset and Y Offset position.

Now for the tough part, math!

For the falling leaf, the start and stop positions have the same X Offset value. Since only the Y Offset value changes, the leaf moves completely vertical. As you also noticed, I chose to link the position to my battery level, where 100% battery puts the leaf at the top and 0% battery brings the leaf all the way to the bottom.

Now, each movement, in each direction, for each element will require different math to make things work properly. If you are working with the battery level, or anything else that scales 0 to 100, it would be pretty convenient if your Y Offset movement was also 100. When I first built this widget, I lucked out in this manner, the Y Offset of my leaf needed to travel 200 points, from 0 to 200. So, for every battery percentage tick, the bitmap element had to move two points.

In terms of the math, moving 200 points looked something like this: (100 – battery level) * 2. (So, when the battery level is at 100%, the Y Offset is at 0. Battery at 0%, Y Offset at 200, and when battery at 50%, the Y Offset made it to 100.)

Once you get your math figured out, feed it into the Advanced Parameters section of your element. You’ll need to tie it to the appropriate X Offset and/or Y Offset parameters. If you are copying my project word for word today, your code will look like this:

[oy](100-#BLEVN#)*2[/oy]

Tap that checkmark to save your work, then hit the system Back button to save and close out of the widget.

Go check it out. How is it working for you? If it is not exactly what you were looking for, do not be disheartened. It may take a bit of tweaking to get your moving widget to perform as desired. For example, the code above will bring the Y Offset value to 200 when battery level hits 0%, but if you’ve ever let your device get low on juice, you know that 0% is nearly impossible to achieve, which means you will never see your element at the Y Offset value of 200.

What’s next

Since completion of the steps above, I have added two changes to my falling leaf. First, I have modified its positions and rate of fall, second, I have added a little twist, literally.

To achieve the leaf fall positions you see in the opening animation to this article, I changed the leaf so that it no longer starts at the very top, it no longer goes all the way to the bottom (Y Offset 200) and instead of moving at a pace of 2 points per battery percent, it now moves a little slower. You’ll see that the new Advanced Parameter code is not mathematically optimized, but it is strictly based off of above code, just to keep it understandable. As follows:

[oy]((100-#BLEVN#)*1.2)-40[/oy]

The results are pretty straightforward, the leaf sits at Y Offset value -40 when the battery is full and would drop to 80 if the battery dropped to 0%.

The Twist. I do really mean that literally, the leaf now spins as it drops down. It is a little thing, and perhaps not that attractive if you look at it too closely, so we won’t – here is the code:

[r]#BLEVN#*3.6[/r]

Now, for the biggest piece of knowledge you should take away from this article, you can insert more than one code block in a single element’s Advanced Parameters section. As in the image below, just go ahead and type out your new code block right at the end of the first, no space or separators required. Just try not to send multiple commands to the same parameter, if you can avoid it.

Next week

Next week on our Android customization series, we’d like to take a look at a physical productivity tool, we will show you how to connect a USB flash drive to your typical Android device. As I sit here in a hotel room, relegated to their non-protected open WiFi, I realize that it is just not smart to use my typical WiFi file transfer tool, so instead, well, I’ll show you what I did next week.

While it is quite difficult to make a one size fits all dynamic Zooper Widget like this one, how did you find the process? Have you created a masterpiece worth showing off?

Have you had greater success with your spelling after taking control of your auto-correct settings in last week’s Android customization post? I hope so. Now that you are in control of your Android keyboard, let’s take a look at controlling your Android lock screen, or at least utilizing it with widgets.

The idea of putting a widget on your lock screen is not new, it has been around since Android 4.2 natively, and prior using alternate apps. When it was introduced, it was available as a tool that any developer could create or modify their Homescreen widget to show on the lock screen. This was utilized by having the user swipe the default clock to the side and manually add widgets as desired.

Android 5.0 Lollipop changed things up a bit. Gone was the ability to select near any widget for your lock screen, instead swiping to the sides now triggers your phone application and your camera, on stock Android at least. In place, Android introduced a new and complex method and controls for displaying notifications on the lock screen.

Before we begin

I hope it goes without saying,you will need a device running at least Android 5.0 Lollipop to follow along today. We will use an Android 5.1 equipped Google Play edition phone ourselves. Although there are many apps, both free and paid, that can offer similar functionality to what we are about to look at, we will be using the paid app Notifidgets today. It has a 7 day trial, but will run you $0.99 via in-app purchase to continue.

Remember, other apps provide similar functionality, like the very similarly named NotifWidget that handles a few more options.

How to put widgets on your Android Lollipop lock screen

The premise is pretty simple here folks, you really cannot put widgets on the lock screen. Since Lollipop has been locked down to just include notifications on the lock screen, the solution has been to put your widgets into notifications.

Notifidgets is simple enough, it is a persistent notification that itself hosts your normal desktop widgets.

Open up Notifidgets and tap the Material Design big green “+” button.

Choose your desired widget.

Special note here that you can select your other customization widgets, like Zooper Widget and Tasker. You recall we’ve talked about both at length before, so you can now put that power right on your lock screen, if you want it.

As you can see, you are able to put multiple widgets into Notifidgets, so go ahead and load up. Just remember that these will be on your lock screen, so anyone that picks up your phone will be able to see and interact with your widgets and the information that they present.

Make sure Notifidgets is turned on with the toggle at the top.

You are done.

The next time your phone locks, you will be able to see your widgets inside of the Notifidgets notification on your lock screen.

If Notifidgets is not showing, make sure that the app has not been closed by a task manager or the like. Also, if you have locked down your lock screen security, be sure to allow all notifications for Notifidgets on your lock screen. If you need assistance managing lock screen security settings, we took a quick look at that a while back as well.

Finally, you will likely find that the Notifidgets notification on your lock screen is in the minimized state, use a two finger pull down action to expand it.

What’s next

Do you recall how I mentioned you are able to place widgets by Zooper Widget in Notifidgets? That was a tongue twister, just as the idea that a deep rooted Zooper Widget with Tasker controls can bring near any functionality and information to your lock screen. Be sure to check out some of our older Zooper Widget and Tasker articles to get an idea of what you might create for your device.

Please keep in mind that Notifidgets is not the only tool out there to take advantage of the new lock screen of Android Lollipop. NotifWidgets and Notifidgets are just the two we’ve been using.

Also, we did not talk at all about the many lock screen alternatives out there, applications that are specifically built to take over the secured entry to your Android device. Many of these apps, especially in the earlier days of Android, were the only way to get custom info on your lock screen. Sadly, many of them were quickly forgotten when Android 4.2 rolled out.

In the end, Google’s vision is to not have you use widgets on your lock screen, the idea and controls for having notifications show prominently is the new approach. We admit that this is a solid technique to make sure that the content you are seeing is new and relevant, but for those of us that like just a little bit more detail, we are happy that there are options out there.

Next week

I hope you liked the idea of Notifidgets, and the ability to place multiple widgets into a single notification on your lock screen. Next week on our Android customization series, we want to tackle this task in a different way with our trusty old what-can’t-it-do application, Tasker.

Do you spend time developing your lock screen, or would you rather just jump into Android and get on with things?

I hope you had the chance to take a quick look at our last Android customization post, it was one of our helpful how-to posts instead of being an actual customization, just a brief tutorial on using Google Maps offline. This week we have a crazy project for you, using almost all of our favorite customization apps.

Join us as we put a custom notification on our Homescreen using Zooper Widget, Tasker, Pushbullet and IF.

Note: There are easier, and possibly better, methods to tackle the end product here today. Although I like what this project does, we are really here to focus on using and learning the programs behind it all.

Get ready, we are about to revisit integrating four major customization apps into one flexible and highly customized product, a Homescreen widget that tells you when the latest Android Authority Podcast has been published.

Before we begin

You are going to need to pull out your saved Google Opinion Rewards budget today, or spend some cash. But, let’s start with the free apps:

IF in the Play StoreIF, which was formerly called IFTTT, standing for If This Then That, is free in the Google Play Store. Alternatively, you can get away with only using their web client today at ifttt.com, so you do not even need to install the app on your Android device, if you don’t want to.

Pushbullet in the Play StorePushbullet is also free in the Google Play Store. If you are not sure what Pushbullet is, be sure to check some of our previous projects and news on the app and service.

Tasker in the Play StoreTasker is $2.99 in the Google Play Store. While Tasker is not free, and is getting to be a really old app, it is still one of the most powerful Android customization tools around. Seriously, Tasker can take control of nearly any aspect of your device and allows you to automate so many things.

Zooper Widget in the Play StoreZooper Widget has a free version that will get you through most of today’s project, however, you may want to drop the $2.99 to get the Pro version of the app. Zooper Widget is a highly customizable Homescreen widget, allowing you to manually create functional, responsive and aesthetically diverse widgets.

What is this project, exactly?

Our project today is to put a custom and fun notification on our device, based on an RSS feed. Specifically, we want notification when the newest AA Podcast has been published. You can use any RSS feed that you desire though.

With that said, the actual goal today is to work with our favorite apps. As it so happens, each of the four apps – IF, Pushbullet, Tasker and Zooper Widget – have an important role in the project, and we get to work with their ability to integrate with each other, as follows:

IF uses a Pushbullet channel, Pushbullet is then linked into Tasker and Tasker then sends word to Zooper Widget to display our notification. The best tool for each job.

Let’s get started.

Custom RSS feed notification in a widget

As it so happens, alphabetical order is also the order in which our apps will operate for this project.

Part 1 – IF

If you are not a user of the IF Android app already, I would actually recommend proceeding on the web, instead of your Android device. IF is a powerful app that is fairly battery friendly, but there is no point eating juice just for this project. While the procedure remains the same for app and website, the actual process changes a little. I’ll try to show both at the same time.

Open IF, the site or the app, and look for the button to create a new recipe.

For your this trigger, select Feed.

Select New feed item.

Enter your RSS URL, or put ours for the podcast: http://androidauthority.libsyn.com/rss

Click the big blue Create Trigger button.

Now click on that.

Find and select Pushbullet. You may need to enable the Pushbullet channel, which may require you to go create a Pushbullet account so that you can provide IF the required access permission.

Select Push a note. I fully admit that there might be fun and more feature rich things you can do with the other Pushbullet actions, but we just want a simple notification from the service for now.

Change the Title to “New AAPodcast” or something that you can easily remember. You will need to enter this title later in today’s project, so take note of it.

Click Create Action.

Click Create Recipe.

Very good, you may now exit IF.

You would think that the next app to open is Pushbullet – while you do need to make sure Pushbullet is installed, configured and able to access your device notifications (in Android Lollipop you would go to Settings -> Sound & notifications -> Notification access and grant Pushbullet the required access to notifications,) otherwise, there is no need to actually open the app for this project.

Part 2 – Tasker

In Tasker, we are going to need to create 2 Tasks and one Profile today. The first Task sets a variable for Zooper Widget to use, the second Task clears that variable and the Profile is what integrates with Pushbullet to trigger all the activity.

Open Tasker.

Task 1 – Notification counter

Create a new Task and name it something appropriate. I will call mine “NewAAPodcastNotify“.

Tap the “+” to add an action.

Select Variables.

Select Variable Set.

Enter a new Variable name, make sure it is in all caps so that the variable is global. I called mine “%AAPOD“.

In the To section, we want to take our value (which will default to 0) and add 1 each time the Task is fired. To do so, enter the text “%AAPOD + 1“.

Turn on the toggle beside Do Maths. This actually should not be required, but it is better to be safe than sorry.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit this action.

Next, click the “+” button to start another action.

Select Plugin.

Select Zooper Widget.

Tap the pencil to the right of Configuration.

What we are doing is creating a variable specifically for Zooper Widget to read.

In the ZW Variable field, enter a new variable name to be used later from within Zooper Widget. I called mine “AAPOD” to keep it simple, but you might consider calling it something like AAPODZ or ZWAAPOD, just remember to take a note of this variable for later.

Then, in the ZW Text field, enter the previous Tasker variable that you created, including the preceding % symbol. Mine was called “%AAPOD“.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit out of the Task creation.

Do you see how this all works? Every time this Task runs it adds 1 to the value of the Variable, then reports that to Zooper Widget so that it can act on the value.

We will now create your second Task,

Task 2 – Cleanup

This second Task is for cleanup purposes, you can skip this until later, but you will have to eventually come back to it or find a new way to tell your notification to turn off.

Start a new Task and give it an appropriate name, I’ve called mine “ClearAAPod“.

Tap the “+” button to add a new action.

Select Variable.

Select Variable Set.

Tap the tag icon on the right side of the Variable name field and chose your previously created podcast variable, if you recall, mine was called “%AAPOD“.

In the To section, simply enter the value 0.

Click the system Back button to save out of this action. We now need to add another action to the Task.

We will actually be duplicating the ZW variable set action from our other Task, feel free to copy and paste that instead of creating something new here, otherwise:

Tap the “+” again to add another action.

Select Plugin.

Select Zooper Widget.

Tap the pencil to the right of Configuration.

In the ZW Variable field, enter your previously chosen variable name for Zooper Widget. I had called mine “AAPOD” but you might have gone with AAPODZ or ZWAAPOD or something.

Then, in the ZW Text field, enter the Tasker variable again, including the preceding % symbol. Mine was called “%AAPOD“.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit out of the Task creation.

What happens now, when this Task is run it will clear the variable back to 0 and report that variable to Zooper Widget to act upon.

Optional: What app do you use to listen to the AA Podcast? If you want your project today to open that app, now is the time to enter that procedure. In my case, I want to launch SoundCloud when a new AA Podcast is published and this Task is run. Simply create a new action, select App -> Launch App then choose the app you would like to launch.

Now hit that system back button to save and exit.

We will create our Profile now.

Profile – Watch for the Pushbullet notification and take action

Start your new Profile, name it appropriately, if applicable to your setup.

Select Event.

Select Plugin.

Select Pushbullet.

Tap the edit button beside the word Configuration. Enter the values as follows:

If I receive a note

Under Containing the text, replace “Optional filter” with your note from IF, I had entered “New AAPodcast“.

I recommend then dismissing or even deleting the push, but you can leave it, if you want to see the Pushbullet notification as well as our completed Homescreen widget notification.

Tap the check mark in the very top right corner to save the Pushbullet settings, then hit the system Back button to save and back out of the Event editing.

Choose your notification trigger Task, I had called mine “NewAAPodcastNotify.”

That will do it for Tasker, go ahead and back out to your Homescreen. Let’s move on to Zooper Widget. We’re almost done.

Part 3 – Zooper Widget

You may handle this in several different ways, but for today, I am going to create a Zooper widget that displays nothing by default, then it will display an image and text when a new podcast is published. Finally, when I click on that image that popped up, it will dismiss the image and text back to nothing, and open my favorite podcast app to listen to the new episode.

Pull out your creativity cap, it’s time to design a widget.

I will leave you to design a new Zooper Widget and decide how you want it to look. Consider how it will look by default, then how it will look when there is a notification. You will probably want to first set it up as it will appear when there is a notification, then we’ll use advanced code to manipulate it to your default view. Let’s go through that.

As you can see, I have just two elements in my Zooper Widget, a Bitmap and Text. In the designer, I set them up as they would be viewed when there is a notification. If you are also actually building this Android Authority Podcast notification, here, take this image for your design, if you want it.

Let’s add code to hide the elements by default and pop them up when there is a notification. If you are not sure how we know if there is a notification, it was that Variable we set in Tasker – if the Variable is 0, then there is no notification, if the Variable is 1 or higher, then there is a new Podcast, sounds so simple!

Click into the Bitmap image.

Scroll to the bottom and select Advanced Parameters.

Now we enter a conditional statement that tells the image to live in two different spots based on the Tasker variable. if you are following word for word so far today, here is the code you want:

$#TAAPOD#>0?[ox]0[/ox]:[ox]6000[/ox]$

Got it? I know, it’s been a while, so, that string says: If our Tasker variable is greater than 0, display our notification image at position X=0. Else, if the variable is at 0, then we want the image to display at position X=6000, or choose some other ridiculously high number that will put the image way off of the screen.

Hit that check mark to save the Advanced Parameters.

We will now instruct Zooper Widget to clean things up and open our podcast app when the image is clicked.

Select Module On Tap.

Swipe over to Shortcuts.

Select Task Shortcut.

Find and select your Tasker Task that cleans up the variable and launches your podcast app. Mine was called “ClearAAPOD.”

Review your Tasker Task and add an icon in the bottom right, then simply hit the system Back button to save and exit back to Zooper Widget.

We’re done here, hit the system Back button again to save out of the image settings.

Now, head into your Text element.

Scroll part way down and select Edit text manually.

What we do here is have the text element display the value of the variable being sent over from Tasker. The code will be:

$#TAAPOD#=0? :#TAAPOD#$

Take note of the empty space after the “?”

In English: if our variable has a value of 0, show an empty space (which is really just showing nothing,) else, if the variable actually has a value, simply show the value.

Tap that check mark in the top right to save out of the Advanced Parameter, and hit the system Back button to save out of the Text element.

Guess what, you’re all done. Exit out of Zooper Widget and see what you’ve got.

What’s next

I probably don’t have to mention that you are going to need to be patient to see this project in action. Luckily, we record the podcast every Friday and try to publish over the weekend. If you really cannot wait, no worries, head back into Tasker, open the first Task you created today and hit the play/run button in the bottom left corner.

If you have manually run the first Task, don’t forget you’ll need to then run the second Task to clear things up. You should be able to click the image on the Zooper Widget, but you can also manually run it from within Tasker if you run into any issues.

Today’s project can be utilized for any RSS feed, including to collect all Android Authority posts (http://feed.androidauthority.com/) – just remember to open the AA app instead of your podcasting app when you setup the Tasker cleanup Task above.

One last thing, don’t forget that the actions you created here today in IF, through Pushbullet, and in Tasker can be utilized for any other project on your device, or even on a PC and more. IF and Pushbullet both have web and PC (and browser plugin) support, you could easily rig things to receive your notifications on your computer as well as your Android device. If you are interested, try this out for fun: When you click on the Zooper Widget notification, have it pop up a Tasker built window or voice input that allows you to choose whether to open your local podcast app or pass the notification off to your PC. This is all about choice, after all.

Next week

I hope this monster of an Android customization project served as a reminder of the power of these great apps. We are big fans of IF, Pushbullet, Tasker and Zooper Widget, and we hope you are too. Let’s spend a bit more time working around IF again next week, in between the default Android actions and the integration with other great apps and services, I am sure we can find a cool way to do something fancy.

I am sure you guys will point out easier and more efficient ways to handle this same task today, and please do. My goal was for a project that uses all four of these cusomization apps, I kept it as simple as possible, but I’d love to see what differences you would make.

Do you remember at the end of our Android customization project last week, when we finished up making a little voice reminder using Tasker, and I said we’d skip Tasker this week? I lied. Join me as we use Tasker’s HTTP Get tool, along with Zooper Widget, to put a daily joke on your Homescreen.

As always, this project is designed to help us learn a few new tools in Tasker, I hope your customization education is coming along. From there, we want to keep it light, as today is Thanksgiving day in the U.S. This project might take some time to build, but it’s really easy, then you can get back to Black Friday shopping.

Before we begin

Tasker - Google Play StoreTasker and Zooper Widget. For some reason I think I’ve written these words before. You have got to know the drill by now, you’ll need Tasker installed on your modern Android device to follow along today. Tasker is $2.99 and is still and again found in the Google Play Store.

Zooper Widget - Google Play StoreZooper Widget has a free version that might get you through today, but for the full project, or to also enjoy some of our other Zooper Widget tutorials, you’re going to want to drop $2.99 on Zooper Widget Pro in the Google Play Store.

Finally, you are going to want to find yourself a site that offers up quotes or jokes in a relatively simple text format. I have an example below, but you’ll need to find a site, possibly with an API, to get your source material. Read on to see what I’m talking about, but consider not actually building your project until you find your content.

Daily Joke on your Homescreen

Our project will proceed very similarly to previous Tasker/Zooper Widget projects. We will perform actions in Tasker, then we’ll transfer the final data over to Zooper Widget to display on your screen.

The Tasker actions I speak of will be to use the HTTP Get command, much like you may have done in your CMD screen on the PC. We’ll collect a joke from the web, we’ll have to tweak it through variables to strip away extra info, then we’ll save that text into a variable for Zooper Widget.

From there, as before, Zooper Widget will accept the variable from Tasker and simply display the supplied text. You get to choose exactly how you want that info to display. Perhaps you’ll add it into an existing Zooper Widget clock, or create a new widget to get the most out of it.

Finally, we’ll head back to Tasker to create a little Profile that triggers the actions above at least once per day. You may want to wake up to a new joke or quote each day, or maybe you’d prefer a new one every hour, it’s up to you.

Let’s get started.

Tasker HTTP Get

Once you have chosen a site that provides the data you are looking for, the process goes pretty quick. I’ll be using a site that specialized in Chuck Norris one-liner jokes. Not all of them are family friendly, but they’re not too bad. The reason I’ve chosen this site is not so much for the content as because they offer up an API and a simple way to get just a joke in text format. I’ll explain as we go.

Fire up Tasker and head to the Tasks section.

Tap the “+” button to add a new Task. Provide an appropriate name, I’ll call mine “HTTPGetJoke“.

Tap the “+” button to ad your first action.

Select Net.

Select HTTP Get.

Enter the Server:Port as required by your web source. Our provider of Chuck Norris jokes are available if you enter “api.icndb.com/jokes/random“.

Scroll down to Output File and enter the name of a new text file. You can head over to manually add the text file if you want, but Tasker can create it for you if it does not yet exist. Just be sure a file by the name you enter does not already exist, or it will be overwritten.

So, Output File, I’ll enter “DailyRandomChuckNorrisJoke.txt“.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

Now, tap that “+” button to add another action. We need to read that file into a variable.

Select File.

Select Read File.

Under File, enter the name of your text file from above, mine was “DailyRandomChuckNorrisJoke.txt.”

Under To Var, enter a new global variable, I’ll call mine “%HTTPGETJOKE“.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

The result now stored in your variable from the HTTP Get command is a text string with the joke and some extra info. For our needs, we’ll need to strip that extra info.

A sample is as follows:

{ “type”: “success”, “value”: { “id”: 448, “joke”: “When Chuck Norris throws exceptions, it’s across the room.”, “categories”: [“nerdy”] } }

Any idea what to do next? That’s right, we need to use the Variable Split tool to strip away the fluff. Now, you’ll have to carefully identify what characters are required to split the text in the right places. Unfortunately, our example has different characters before and after the actual joke, so we’ll need to Variable Split twice. Let’s do it.

Tap the “+” button to add a new action.

Select Variables.

Select Variable Split.

Under Name, enter your “%HTTPGETJOKE” variable name.

Then, under Splitter, we’ll split on “joke”: “” Note the “‘s within the “‘s and the empty space after the colon.

This time, we will turn on Delete Base. This simply deletes the original variable, which saves RAM usage.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

That helps us clear away the text leading the joke, now to clear the text after the joke.

Tap the “+” button to add the next split.

Select Variables. then select Variable Split.

Under Name, enter the newly created variable from the previous split. For me, that will be “%HTTPGETJOKE2“.

Under Splitter, enter the characters that will split out the joke from the end of the saved text string, that’ll be ““, “” from this site. (That’s quote comma space quote.) Also, that’s not supposed to be an emoji of any sort.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

Finally, we save that last split variable into a Zooper Widget variable.

Tap the “+” button to start our last action.

Select Plugin.

Select Zooper Widget.

Tap the pencil icon to the right of Configuration.

Enter a Zooper Widget variable name. Mine will be “HTTPGETJOKE“.

Then enter the final split variable that contains your joke, mine is “%HTTPGETJOKE21“.

Hit that Save button in the top right corner. Then hit the system Back button to save and exit.

Before you exit out of here, be sure to hit that Run Task (Play arrow) button in the bottom left of your screen. It will be much easier in the next stages if you have a joke pre-loaded.

We’re done in Tasker for a bit, time to hit Zooper Widget.

Add the joke to Zooper Widget

I will leave you to follow along previous tutorial or otherwise create a Zooper Widget widget to work with today.

I recommend using a new Rich Text element, as the normal Text element is a little less flexible.

Add your new Rich Text element, feel free to size it up and adjust its location and when you’re ready we’ll add the joke.

Head into Edit text manually.

Enter the value for your Tasker saved variable. Mine will be #THTTPGETJOKE#

Tap OK in the top right to save.

Optionally, you can add another element, or simply use the Module OnTap setting on the text to trigger the Tasker Task again. This way when you tap the text you get a new joke. Pretty slick.

I recommend allowing your Rich Text element to span a maximum of at least 3 rows, depending on your design. I have mine set to 5 rows with font size 12. This adequately covers the width of my screen.

Hit that system Back button as needed to save and exit right out of Zooper Widget.

Look at that, if you’ve done everything properly, you will see a Chuck Norris joke on your Homescreen. Or a motivational quote, if that’s what you chose. I wonder if there are Chuck Norris themed motivational quotes out there?

Optional: Trigger a new joke with a tap of the widget. As you see, I added a Bitmap image as my trigger button.

If you enabled the Module OnTap function, and that is all you want, you are done. Clean up the widget so that it is perfect and go on your merry way. Otherwise, let’s make this thing auto-update every day.

Update it daily

Head back into Tasker, into the Profiles tab.

Tap the “+” button to add a new Profile.

Select Time.

Enter the time of the day you’d like to update. This can be while you are sleeping, or whenever you want.

Enter the same time in both the From and To fields. I’ll use 73. Sorry, I mean 7:30 am.

Optionally, enter a Repeat value if you want more than one update per day.

Hit the system Back button to save.

Choose your HTTPGetJoke Task from the popup list.

That’s it folks. Save and exit and try not to get in trouble with Chuck Norris.

What’s next

We simply slapped this joke onto a Zooper Widget widget on the Homescreen. Don’t forget that you can put it on your Lock screen if you want. We’ve handled the basic procedure before.

Honestly, the hardest part of today’s project is going to be finding a quality web source of quotes and jokes. Things can get very complicated with the Variable Split commands, especially if you are trying to extract a single line of text from a full web page. You can do it, just find the appropriate character string for your Split and don’t be afraid to split several times in a row to whittle down to your content.

Next week

I wish this was a little bit more Thanksgiving themed for you, but I hope this Android customization project to put a Chuck Norris joke on your Homescreen was enough for you. Next week we’ll actually be taking a step back from Tasker, we need to dive into a pretty basic user setting on almost all Android devices, Text-to-speech. This will be a beginner’s level tutorial, just something to help the new Android users get the most out of their device.

What do you think, will Chuck Norris approve of this project, or will he roundhouse kick it right off the internet?

Over the last few weeks our Android customization series has provided some great ideas and tricks to manage and reduce power consumption. We would like to take a little break from battery life tools this week to focus on the weather.

With it being that time of year for us northerners, leaves are beginning to turn brown and the weather is beginning to cool down. Now may be a great time prepare for bad weather days by creating a little weather warning system right on your Android device Homescreen.

Chances are, if you’re still reading this, you are interested enough in your weather that you already have a weather widget on your device. And if you’ve been following our customization series, you may even already use Zooper Widget. If this describes you, then you already have the hard part complete and ready to roll today.

Before we get started

You will need Zooper Widget installed on your Android device. The free version will get you by, but if you’ve been testing out all of these Zooper Widget projects, you may have already invested your $2.49 for Zooper Widget Pro in the Google Play Store.

Before proceeding, I will leave it to you to create your own Zooper Widget with a weather indicator. We’ve walked through this before, but you’ll likely want at least the weather scalable icon set in your widget.

We’re going to try to keep it simple, all I want to do is adjust a weather icon to reflect upcoming problematic weather. Specifically, what I want is for my weather icon/indicator to turn red and/or change size if unfavorable weather is headed my way.

This is a modified approach to the techniques we looked at to change the color of your battery indicator based on power level from a while back. That should make this pretty easy. Let’s do this in order, from the beginning:

Create your widget.

Add a weather icon or text element with the weather.

Head to the Advanced parameters section of your weather indicator.

Now, enter only one of the following code snippets, for now. You can come back to mix and match to create your own custom super tool later:

When today’s temperature is to be below 40F, change the indicator blue:
$#W0TEMPN#<40?[c]00F[/c]:[c]FFF[/c]$

When there is snow in the forecast, change the indicator red, and enlarge it:
$#W0COND#=snow?[c]F00[/c][s]60[/s]:[c]FFF[/c][s]30[/s]$
(This assumes that your weather indicator has a default size of 30, thus a size of 60 is a major increase. You will need to identify the default size of your indicator and adjust accordingly.)

Too easy so far? Let’s step it up – When the weather condition is going to be severe today, like a thunderstorm or snow, we’ll do something drastic, like still just changing the indicator to red.
$#W0CODE#>=1&&#W0CODE#<3||#W0CODE#=8?[c]F00[/c]:[c]FFF[/c]$

What is going on here?

I best break that down a bit. #W0COND# breaks into W=weather, 0=today (alternatively, C=current, 1=tomorrow, etc) and CODE=is a weather condition code. All available condition codes can be found here but may act differently depending on your set default weather provider. I have chosen to work with Yahoo! as my provider, you may find that either Open Weather Map (which is the usual default) or Yr.no works better in your area. Change that up in your default Zooper Widget settings.

Back to that string of code, you’ll see I used “&&” and “||” which indicate AND and OR, respectively. So, what we really said up there was ‘if the weather code is greater than or equal to 1 AND below 3, OR it is exactly 8, change the color.’ You’ll have to run through that list of weather codes to decide what you want to check for.

Now that that is all over, be sure to hit the check mark in the top right corner of the screen to save and exit. Then hit the system Back button to save and exit right out of Zooper Widget.

What’s next?

Please do not be discouraged if things are not quite right the first time around. You will have to play with this to see what works best for you. Myself, I tweak and modify my code almost monthly, and at the very least, adapt to the season with more controls for snow and cold during the winter and granular checks for high temps in the summer.

This project started off sounding fairly simple, but revealed some very detailed and complicated techniques, leaving you with tons of options and lots to think about. When you get the hang of what you see here, try combining the weather attributes so that you can adjust your weather icon to account for temperatures, conditions and even humidity levels and wind speeds. You can then still change colors and sizes of elements, but you could also use a dedicated warning icon or text that moves into view when the time is right.

Lastly, and we won’t get into this, don’t forget that Zooper Widget plays nice with Tasker.

Next week

As we close out a topic about notifications of one sort in our Android customization series, I’d like to start looking at notifications in general on your Android device. We’ll begin a multi-part series on handling notifications, partially inspired by what is to come from Android L, and partially inspired by apps that attempt to duplicate that Android L functionality, like HeadsUp!

What do you think about our little weather warning system – I do hope you never see it activated for severe weather, but let us know how it goes and what modifications you have done to make it better?

I am looking out the window at this very moment, it is windy and raining hard. I was able to prepare for it though because my weather warning system built using Zooper Widget in last week’s Android customization series notified me. Speaking of notifications, today we want to step up the notification game, building our own tools, like usual.

Just after Android Lollipop was announced (as Android L) at Google I/O back in June, we took a look at an app that attempted to duplicate the new floating notifications that Android L revealed. The app was called Heads Up! and is now one of many that attempted to bring to you then what Android L promised for later.

Here’s the thing, Heads Up! didn’t work very well for me. Functionally, there were no errors to speak of, I just wanted more control over the notification and didn’t care for the presentation. Most of all, once a notification faded out of the screen, that was it, gone forever. As always, I turned to Tasker to see what I could do for myself. Guess what, the results were exactly what I wanted, and so I shall share my project with you.

Even with Android Lollipop being announced just yesterday, it is still a ways out and we want something today.

Before we begin

On your Android 4.0 or higher device, we’ll need Tasker installed for today’s project. Tasker is still $2.49 in the Google Play Store.

This project is actually much larger than I can rightly squeeze into a single post. In all, we will look at several projects over the coming weeks. Starting today, we’ll collect notifications and display them through a pop up using Tasker itself. From there, we will look at providing a custom notification count using Zooper Widget, we will combine the two, and we may just dive into Tasker Scenes, if the selection of notification options doesn’t yet feel complete.

I’ll leave it to you to head back to previous Tasker projects for a reminder on how to get Tasker up and running. Fire up a new Task, I’ll call mine “BasicNotify“, then add the following action:

Select Alert.

Select Flash.

Tap the labels/tags icon to the right of Text.

Scroll down and choose Notification Title, or just type in %NTITLE on the Text line.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit out of the Task.

Fire up your Tasker Profile, I called mine “GetAllNotifications” and add the following:

Choose Event.

Choose UI.

Choose Notification.

Tap the little spaceship icon to the right of Owner Application.

In the bottom right, tap All.

Tap the system Back button to save the app selection, then tap it again to save the Profile event.

Choose your notification Task from earlier, mine was called “BasicNotify.”

Tap the system Back button when you are done to save and exit out of Tasker. Project complete.

What’s next

Now comes the waiting game, but the next time a notification comes in to your system, any notification, it will pop up in a semi-transparent, non-actionable, flash notification on your screen. It’ll hang out for a few seconds before going away. It really does not do that much, but these are the basics we need to take the project to the next level.

There are very few options to mess with on this one, but do play around with it if you desire. We will eventually dive into creating custom Scenes using Tasker, which will let you create exactly the popup that you desire. Again, feel free to poke around with Scenes, but I’ve got some better stuff on deck for you before I get there.

Bonus: How to view history of all Notifications

Typically, once a notification is swiped away or tapped, it is up to your memory to figure out what that notification said, if you even happened to see it in the first place. Did you know there is a way to view all recent notifications? Just find an empty 1×1 space on your homescreen and start the process to add a shortcut. Under Shortcuts, look for Settings Shortcuts, then simply choose Notifications. You can’t do much with the list, and it is not very informative, but I am sure you’ll find a use for it.

Next week

As mentioned, this is just the basic starter to creating a custom notification tool that you will eventually use to make stock Android L users jealous. Don’t get me wrong, the Android L floating notification looks very cool, and will be quite functional, but that is not going to stop us from taking things to the next level in our Android customization series. Specifically, next week we’d like to look at using Zooper Widget to build an SMS and Gmail notification counter.

I know it’s pretty basic, but what do you say, is this simple little notification popup making things better for you?

Continuing with notification management tools in our Android customization series, we will be using Zooper Widget today to build a simple Gmail and SMS counter for your Homescreen.

Last week, we took to notification management by using Tasker to popup a simple read-only alert for all incoming notifications to your device. Today’s approach works great along side the notification popup, adding a counter of specific notification types.

Zooper Widget is capable of handling a few messaging tasks, but has made it really simple to add Gmail and SMS counters to your custom widget. We will start with these two service today, then we’ll expand on the project next time, to include any app or service you have installed on your device.

Before we get started

You will need Zooper Widget installed on your device for today’s project. Zooper Widget free will work, but again, it has limitations. You may consider dropping the $2.49 in the Google Play Store for Zooper Widget Pro if you wish to implement everything as we will in this project.

A little background before we get started: I am going to show off today’s project in several different ways, but I will only cover the new material once. You may need to head back to previous Zooper Widget tutorials to get an idea how you might handle each of the examples and what elements are available to you.

My primary Gmail widget is the basic gmail app icon, when a new message arrives, an additional image and text pops onto the screen. The other examples will include pure text, the boring old red dot counter and simply having the letter “G” popup when the time is right. Again, these are all near identical, just a touch of different code in the Advanced Parameters.

Set up your base widget, for my personal usage, I have the app icon as the main element in my widget, it is clickable into Gmail itself, and I was sure to leave empty space within the actual widget area for both the pop up notification and as my way to click into the Zooper Widget setup screens.

There are two elements that are to be adjusted, the little popup image or red dot and the text counter.

For this, let us use the red dot example. I would have used my actual bitmap image popup as example, but I do not have permission to share the icons I’ve used (3K SR Black icon set.)

Again, I will leave it to you to design the widget, create your dot, or image, then size and position it appropriately. Take note of the X Offset value. We did this stuff back in this Zooper Widget tutorial, if you need help.

Now, create your text element, manually change it to a value like 10 for now so you can size and position it appropriately.

Once everything is looking good from a design perspective, we’ll go into the advanced stuff, as follows:

You remember your X Offset value from above, right? Good. Head on into your Red Dot.

Scroll to the bottom and enter Advanced Parameters.

Enter the following code:

$#SUG#>0?[ox]20[/ox]:[ox]10000[/ox]$
Replace “20” with your X Offset Value.

Tap the checkmark in the top right to save and exit Advanced Parameters.

Tap the system Back button to exit back to the Module Manager.

Head into your Text element.

Scroll down a short ways and tap into Edit text manually.

Enter the following code:

$#SUG#>0?#SUG#: $

Tap the checkmark in the top right to save and exit the text editor.

Tap the system Back button to exit all the way out of Zooper Widget. That’s right, project complete.

What happened up there?

If you followed along previous Zooper Widget tutorials that worked with Advanced Parameters, including the Weather Warning system from a couple weeks back, then you might be able to guess your way through this one.

Once again, we utilized the IF statement for our string. #SUG# is the check for messages in your first Gmail account inbox. If you wish to see more options on that one, #SUG# and related live within the System section of Advanced Parameters. The only other new trick here is the blank text at the end of the Text element string – #SUG#: $ With the space ” ” after the colon, Zooper knowns to put nothing on screen.

As pseudo english, for the Red Dot we said IF Gmail message count is greater than 0 THEN position the red dot in view, ELSE position it ten thousand pixels off the screen. For the text string, IF Gmail message count is greater than 0 THEN show the message count, ELSE show nothing. I hope that made sense.

This is going to possibly be one of the shortest step-by-step tutorials that I ever write:

Using the same steps and code as in the Gmail tutorials above, change just one small thing – use Advanced code #SUSMS# instead of Gmail’s #SUG#. That is it, the SMS counter is pretty simple, once you’ve gone through the Gmail one.

What’s next

Now that you’ve got the hang of things here, go ahead and adjust the basic code above to work for the other Zooper Widget elements that you might like to use. I showed off the letter “G” popping up on screen, I assume you might want that embedded into another widget on your screen instead of a dedicated widget. Don’t be afraid to play with it and show off what you come up with.

You may also desire to tackle notifications for other services on your device. Although there are things that can be done within Zooper Widget alone, I have never bothered trying. Instead, I find that Tasker adds that extra functionality and customization. What do you know, we will be doing just that next week.

Next Week

Gmail and SMS are a great start, but there are plenty of other messaging services that most of use. Next week on our Android customization series, we’ll take today’s tutorial to a whole new level. Utilizing Tasker, we’ll show you how to collect notifications from any app and display a counter on your Zooper Widget. By request, this will dive into Variables – that’s you Waterdroid – for both Tasker and Zooper Widget. Bring your thinking caps, it’s going to be a big one.

That is two rather simple projects in a row, don’t worry, they both lead into the big one for next week.

Any ideas on improving this project? Please show off your creations in the comments below, we love to see what you come up with.

If you’ve been following along the last couple Android customization tutorials, you’ve seen how to collect incoming notifications and pop them up as a simple flash over your screen using Tasker. You’ve also seen how to put a custom Gmail and SMS count/indicator on your Homescreen through Zooper Widget. No better time then to marry the two and put any and all notifications on the Homescreen.

The idea is simple enough, we collect notifications using Tasker, based on the principles learned a couple weeks back. Then we take action on them by displaying a counter on the Homescreen using Zooper Widget, similar to how we used Gmail and SMS last week. This project will require that we utilize variables within both apps and have Tasker and Zooper Widget work together, like we’ve done in the past.

If you haven’t gathered yet, today’s project accomplishes something pretty solid by pulling together bits and pieces of our previous work. If this were a TV show, it would be one of those recap episodes that spends its time replaying past scenes to tell a new story.

Before we get started

You will require two pieces of software today, Tasker is $2.99 in the Google Play Store and Zooper Widget Pro is $2.49 in the Google Play Store.

TaskerZooper Widget

If this is your first time out, you might be thinking that five bucks is pretty expensive to tackle this simple project, and I would completely agree. However, I would urge you to check out all of the other great things that Tasker and Zooper Widget can do. Coming from a guy that cannot justify spending even a penny on in-app purchases for games, I have had no regrets whatsoever on purchasing these two apps, and I got in when Tasker was $7.

First and foremost, please understand that we will be working off of collected incoming notifications to your Android device. This project does not connect to your various services and is not designed to be a full service notification tool, it is designed simply to display an indicator that a notification has arrived for a given app, without regard to what that notification should be.

Today’s example will work from the familiar designs we started with last week. I will focus on the Google+ app, but the same steps apply to absolutely every app on your device.

Let’s talk this through before we dive into the code.

First, you will need to create a Zooper Widget for this project. Perhaps you already have a widget, like a clock, that you would like to just add a tiny counter on the side, or maybe you want a full dedicated widget, the choice is yours.

Once the widget is setup, we collect the notifications, store their count as a variable in both Tasker and Zooper Widget, then act on those variables by displaying an indicator, or the count itself on your widget. With that out of the way, we will require cleanup tasks, basically, we must decide when to return the variables and counter back to zero.

Please follow along last week’s tutorial to create your Zooper Widget on your Homescreen. You won’t need to enter the Advanced Parameter code from last week, just the design of your widget.

Take a quick look through the Tasker project we did two weeks ago, at that time, we collected all incoming notifications and flashed them to screen. This time around we will be a little bit more picky, collecting only notifications from a single app and storing them in a variable.

We will create a simple Tasker Task with just two actions. Start your Task and give it an appropriate name, I will call mine “GooglePlusNotification.”

Tap the “+” bottom to add an action.

Select Variables.

Select Variable Set.

In the Name field, enter a unique and concise variable name for within Tasker, preceded by the % symbol. I will call mine “%GPN“.

Special note: it is crucial that you consider your use-case when creating variables in Tasker. A full uppercase variable name designates it a global variable, accessible by other aspects of Tasker. If you include even a single lowercase character, the variable will be locked in scope to only operate within this particular Tasker Task. This can be an invaluable advantage for some projects, but will prevent our project today from operating. If in doubt, use all uppercase characters.

In the To field, we want to incrementally increase the value of the variable, so you will enter “your variable name + 1”. So, mine looks like “%GPN + 1“.

Finally, we’ll need that to evaluate, so check the box beside Do Maths.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

Now we create action two in this Task.

Tap the “+” button to add our second action.

Select Plugin.

Select Zooper Widget Pro.

Tap the pencil icon in the top right, beside Configure.

In the ZW Variable field, enter a unique and concise variable name for Zooper Widget, I will risk confusing myself by simply calling mine “GPN“.

In the ZW Text field, we want to assign the value of the matching Tasker variable, enter your Tasker variable name, mine was called “%GPN“.

Tap the save icon at the bottom of the screen.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit out of the action, then out of the Tasker Task. We are finished here.

I know you have now looked back over our Android customization post from two weeks prior to this one, where we collected all incoming notifications. This is very similar, with just a couple minor changes.

Start your Tasker Profile, if asked, give it an appropriate name, I’ll be calling mine “NotificationGoogle+“.

Select Event.

Select UI.

Select Notification.

Tap the rocket ship to choose an Owner Application.

Select Google+, or whichever app you are building your project for.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

Choose your Tasker Task, you’ll recall I had named mine “GooglePlusNotification.”

Tap your system Back button once again to save and exit right out of Tasker. We will now head to Zooper Widget and collect the variable to work with.

Open up your Zooper Widget that you created above, head into the element that you wish to use to display or change based on the incoming notifications and head into the Advanced Parameters section.

If you are moving an element on and off of the screen, such as the red dot in our example last week, you would use that exact same code, simply swapping out your manually created variable name for the embedded Gmail variable in Zooper Widget. That code will look something like this:

$#TGPN#!=0?[ox]0[/ox]:[ox]10000[/ox]$

Did you get what happened there? The way Zooper Widget understands that you are receiving the variable from Tasker is by using the format #T…#. Expanding this, you see that I’ve inserted my manually created ZW Variable from above, “GPN.” (Not to be confused with the Tasker variable %GPN.) So you will enter #TYOURVARIABLE#, or #TGPN#, and be certain to maintain case sensitivity.

Tap the checkmark to save and exit.

In my example, I am also using a Text element, take the time to modify the code to operate with whichever setup you desire. If you need examples, you could check out our weather warning system from a while back, in which we look at changing element colors, sizes and more.

For our Text element, your code would look something like:

$#TGPN#=0? :#TGPN#$

Remember that the ” ” space will display as nothing on the front end and that your custom variable is used in place of the built-in variables of Zooper Widget.

Tap the checkmark to save and exit, then exit your way out of Zooper Widget. The first stages are complete.

Your notification indicator should be fully operational in terms of letting you know that something has arrived. You’ll quickly notice that it simply adds 1 every time something new arrives and it quickly keeps adding up out of control. We need to find a time to head back into Tasker to reset the variables to 0.

Pro Tip: Take the time now to fine tune your design and layout while the elements are visible on screen.

We will basically require a full new Tasker project to proceed. It will be simple enough to create, but deciding when to use it will be critical to your experience. First things first, we will create a Task that resets the variables. After that, we will create multiple Profiles that trigger the reset.

Create your new Tasker Task and name it appropriately. I have called mine “GooglePlusClearNotify“.

You will almost entirely duplicate everything you did in your “GooglePlusNotification” Task above, this time, instead of your Tasker -> Variable Set -> To being %GPN + 1, it will simply be 0.

Again, assign your ZW Variable to be your Tasker variable, or simple assign it the value 0 as well. Either will do in this scenario.

Tap the Task run button, which looks like a typical normal music play button, the triangle in the bottom of the screen. You won’t notice much here, but when you now tap your system Back button to save and exit all the way out to your Homescreen, you should see that Zooper Widget has reset back to your default 0 notifications state.

Now, we must decide when to run the reset Task above. I have decided to run it every time that I either enter or exit the Google+ app. You may also wish to run the reset Task when a Google+ system notification is clicked, on a timed schedule, at the start of calendar events (clear screen for a meeting) and more.

Trigger reset Task when app opens and closes

Create a new Tasker Profile and give it an appropriate name. You know the drill.

Select Application.

Select Google+, or whichever app you are building on today.

Select your reset Task, mine was called “GooglePlusClearNotify.”

Long press the Task and choose Add Exit Task. Once again, choose your reset Task.

What happens now is that your variable, and therefore Zooper Widget indicator, will change back to zero when you enter Google+. Then, if you receive any new notifications while you are in there, it all gets reset back to 0 again when you exit Google+. The idea is to have a blank slate when you put the app away.

The exit task is much more useful if you are building for an app like the Google Play Store, within which it is fairly common to trigger new notifications by installing or updating other apps.

What’s Next

After using things as described for a short while, you will begin to see another disadvantage of simply acting upon collected incoming system notifications. You will find that checking your messages on a different device will not trigger the notification count to reset on this device.

I will now pull you into the mix, please share with the class if you identify a method of clearing our notification counts across devices. Until then, what I have done is to create a dedicated Tasker Task that manually clears all of my variables, resetting all of my notification counts for all of my custom indicators. The code is identical to the reset Task above, except that this single Task includes a version of those two actions for each variable and Zooper Widget I have running.

Next Week

I think you’ve have enough of handling notifications in our Android customization series, at least for a bit. Besides, Android 5.0 Lollipop is set to start shipping to devices, or at least on the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, before we see each other next. While we take the time to work through Lollipop and its new notification tools, let us look at something else next Thursday.

By request, we would like to revisit Zooper Widget to look specifically at moving objects based on variables. Perhaps the most common implementation of this is in designing a functional analog clock. While a rotating clock is not too hard, if you know your math, we’ll take it a little simpler with an autumn inspired project. Our goal will be to hide functionality behind a touch of class and style, and take another leap forward in Zooper Widget Advanced Parameters.

That was a long one, how did it go for you? Anyone willing to show off their handy work in the comments below?

Did you follow along our Android customization series last week? If you did, you got to walk through building your very own completely custom notification counter for any app right on your Homescreen. This week, as promised, we will look at moving objects around a Zooper Widget based on variables and system settings.

The goal today is to help you disguise things, like your battery level or the outside temperature, behind graphical elements. We will work off of my autumn widget with the falling leaves. I will show you how to move one leaf, you’ll get to apply your new skills to handle the rest.

Before we get started

You will require Zooper Widget for your project today. As always, you can head into the Google Play Store and grab the free version of Zooper Widget. For those that find the few limitations of the free version to be a bother, Zooper Widget Pro is $2.49 in the Google Play Store.

To give you an idea what we are looking at here, I am working from the circular widget that I walked you through in our full Zooper Widget beginner’s guide. You do not need to do all of this work, but you will need to know what the Bitmap element is and how to work some of the basics.

To get started, you’ll want to create your Zooper Widget on your Homescreen and include your image as a Bitmap element. Be sure to size it as needed and then position it in your starting position for your movement. As you’ve seen, I have my tree as a background image, then I’ve positioned my leaves to sit at the top of the element.

As you have seen before, there are many variables built into Zooper Widget that you can work off of. Of course, you can also pull in info from Tasker, but we’ll not address that again today.

With your bitmap element in place, take note of the starting position X Offset and Y Offset position.

Move your bitmap element to your finish position and again take note of the X Offset and Y Offset position.

Now for the tough part, math!

For the falling leaf, the start and stop positions have the same X Offset value. Since only the Y Offset value changes, the leaf moves completely vertical. As you also noticed, I chose to link the position to my battery level, where 100% battery puts the leaf at the top and 0% battery brings the leaf all the way to the bottom.

Now, each movement, in each direction, for each element will require different math to make things work properly. If you are working with the battery level, or anything else that scales 0 to 100, it would be pretty convenient if your Y Offset movement was also 100. When I first built this widget, I lucked out in this manner, the Y Offset of my leaf needed to travel 200 points, from 0 to 200. So, for every battery percentage tick, the bitmap element had to move two points.

In terms of the math, moving 200 points looked something like this: (100 – battery level) * 2. (So, when the battery level is at 100%, the Y Offset is at 0. Battery at 0%, Y Offset at 200, and when battery at 50%, the Y Offset made it to 100.)

Once you get your math figured out, feed it into the Advanced Parameters section of your element. You’ll need to tie it to the appropriate X Offset and/or Y Offset parameters. If you are copying my project word for word today, your code will look like this:

[oy](100-#BLEVN#)*2[/oy]

Tap that checkmark to save your work, then hit the system Back button to save and close out of the widget.

Go check it out. How is it working for you? If it is not exactly what you were looking for, do not be disheartened. It may take a bit of tweaking to get your moving widget to perform as desired. For example, the code above will bring the Y Offset value to 200 when battery level hits 0%, but if you’ve ever let your device get low on juice, you know that 0% is nearly impossible to achieve, which means you will never see your element at the Y Offset value of 200.

What’s next

Since completion of the steps above, I have added two changes to my falling leaf. First, I have modified its positions and rate of fall, second, I have added a little twist, literally.

To achieve the leaf fall positions you see in the opening animation to this article, I changed the leaf so that it no longer starts at the very top, it no longer goes all the way to the bottom (Y Offset 200) and instead of moving at a pace of 2 points per battery percent, it now moves a little slower. You’ll see that the new Advanced Parameter code is not mathematically optimized, but it is strictly based off of above code, just to keep it understandable. As follows:

[oy]((100-#BLEVN#)*1.2)-40[/oy]

The results are pretty straightforward, the leaf sits at Y Offset value -40 when the battery is full and would drop to 80 if the battery dropped to 0%.

The Twist. I do really mean that literally, the leaf now spins as it drops down. It is a little thing, and perhaps not that attractive if you look at it too closely, so we won’t – here is the code:

[r]#BLEVN#*3.6[/r]

Now, for the biggest piece of knowledge you should take away from this article, you can insert more than one code block in a single element’s Advanced Parameters section. As in the image below, just go ahead and type out your new code block right at the end of the first, no space or separators required. Just try not to send multiple commands to the same parameter, if you can avoid it.

Next week

Next week on our Android customization series, we’d like to take a look at a physical productivity tool, we will show you how to connect a USB flash drive to your typical Android device. As I sit here in a hotel room, relegated to their non-protected open WiFi, I realize that it is just not smart to use my typical WiFi file transfer tool, so instead, well, I’ll show you what I did next week.

While it is quite difficult to make a one size fits all dynamic Zooper Widget like this one, how did you find the process? Have you created a masterpiece worth showing off?

Have you had greater success with your spelling after taking control of your auto-correct settings in last week’s Android customization post? I hope so. Now that you are in control of your Android keyboard, let’s take a look at controlling your Android lock screen, or at least utilizing it with widgets.

The idea of putting a widget on your lock screen is not new, it has been around since Android 4.2 natively, and prior using alternate apps. When it was introduced, it was available as a tool that any developer could create or modify their Homescreen widget to show on the lock screen. This was utilized by having the user swipe the default clock to the side and manually add widgets as desired.

Android 5.0 Lollipop changed things up a bit. Gone was the ability to select near any widget for your lock screen, instead swiping to the sides now triggers your phone application and your camera, on stock Android at least. In place, Android introduced a new and complex method and controls for displaying notifications on the lock screen.

Before we begin

I hope it goes without saying,you will need a device running at least Android 5.0 Lollipop to follow along today. We will use an Android 5.1 equipped Google Play edition phone ourselves. Although there are many apps, both free and paid, that can offer similar functionality to what we are about to look at, we will be using the paid app Notifidgets today. It has a 7 day trial, but will run you $0.99 via in-app purchase to continue.

Remember, other apps provide similar functionality, like the very similarly named NotifWidget that handles a few more options.

How to put widgets on your Android Lollipop lock screen

The premise is pretty simple here folks, you really cannot put widgets on the lock screen. Since Lollipop has been locked down to just include notifications on the lock screen, the solution has been to put your widgets into notifications.

Notifidgets is simple enough, it is a persistent notification that itself hosts your normal desktop widgets.

Open up Notifidgets and tap the Material Design big green “+” button.

Choose your desired widget.

Special note here that you can select your other customization widgets, like Zooper Widget and Tasker. You recall we’ve talked about both at length before, so you can now put that power right on your lock screen, if you want it.

As you can see, you are able to put multiple widgets into Notifidgets, so go ahead and load up. Just remember that these will be on your lock screen, so anyone that picks up your phone will be able to see and interact with your widgets and the information that they present.

Make sure Notifidgets is turned on with the toggle at the top.

You are done.

The next time your phone locks, you will be able to see your widgets inside of the Notifidgets notification on your lock screen.

If Notifidgets is not showing, make sure that the app has not been closed by a task manager or the like. Also, if you have locked down your lock screen security, be sure to allow all notifications for Notifidgets on your lock screen. If you need assistance managing lock screen security settings, we took a quick look at that a while back as well.

Finally, you will likely find that the Notifidgets notification on your lock screen is in the minimized state, use a two finger pull down action to expand it.

What’s next

Do you recall how I mentioned you are able to place widgets by Zooper Widget in Notifidgets? That was a tongue twister, just as the idea that a deep rooted Zooper Widget with Tasker controls can bring near any functionality and information to your lock screen. Be sure to check out some of our older Zooper Widget and Tasker articles to get an idea of what you might create for your device.

Please keep in mind that Notifidgets is not the only tool out there to take advantage of the new lock screen of Android Lollipop. NotifWidgets and Notifidgets are just the two we’ve been using.

Also, we did not talk at all about the many lock screen alternatives out there, applications that are specifically built to take over the secured entry to your Android device. Many of these apps, especially in the earlier days of Android, were the only way to get custom info on your lock screen. Sadly, many of them were quickly forgotten when Android 4.2 rolled out.

In the end, Google’s vision is to not have you use widgets on your lock screen, the idea and controls for having notifications show prominently is the new approach. We admit that this is a solid technique to make sure that the content you are seeing is new and relevant, but for those of us that like just a little bit more detail, we are happy that there are options out there.

Next week

I hope you liked the idea of Notifidgets, and the ability to place multiple widgets into a single notification on your lock screen. Next week on our Android customization series, we want to tackle this task in a different way with our trusty old what-can’t-it-do application, Tasker.

Do you spend time developing your lock screen, or would you rather just jump into Android and get on with things?

I hope you had the chance to take a quick look at our last Android customization post, it was one of our helpful how-to posts instead of being an actual customization, just a brief tutorial on using Google Maps offline. This week we have a crazy project for you, using almost all of our favorite customization apps.

Join us as we put a custom notification on our Homescreen using Zooper Widget, Tasker, Pushbullet and IF.

Note: There are easier, and possibly better, methods to tackle the end product here today. Although I like what this project does, we are really here to focus on using and learning the programs behind it all.

Get ready, we are about to revisit integrating four major customization apps into one flexible and highly customized product, a Homescreen widget that tells you when the latest Android Authority Podcast has been published.

Before we begin

You are going to need to pull out your saved Google Opinion Rewards budget today, or spend some cash. But, let’s start with the free apps:

IF in the Play StoreIF, which was formerly called IFTTT, standing for If This Then That, is free in the Google Play Store. Alternatively, you can get away with only using their web client today at ifttt.com, so you do not even need to install the app on your Android device, if you don’t want to.

Pushbullet in the Play StorePushbullet is also free in the Google Play Store. If you are not sure what Pushbullet is, be sure to check some of our previous projects and news on the app and service.

Tasker in the Play StoreTasker is $2.99 in the Google Play Store. While Tasker is not free, and is getting to be a really old app, it is still one of the most powerful Android customization tools around. Seriously, Tasker can take control of nearly any aspect of your device and allows you to automate so many things.

Zooper Widget in the Play StoreZooper Widget has a free version that will get you through most of today’s project, however, you may want to drop the $2.99 to get the Pro version of the app. Zooper Widget is a highly customizable Homescreen widget, allowing you to manually create functional, responsive and aesthetically diverse widgets.

What is this project, exactly?

Our project today is to put a custom and fun notification on our device, based on an RSS feed. Specifically, we want notification when the newest AA Podcast has been published. You can use any RSS feed that you desire though.

With that said, the actual goal today is to work with our favorite apps. As it so happens, each of the four apps – IF, Pushbullet, Tasker and Zooper Widget – have an important role in the project, and we get to work with their ability to integrate with each other, as follows:

IF uses a Pushbullet channel, Pushbullet is then linked into Tasker and Tasker then sends word to Zooper Widget to display our notification. The best tool for each job.

Let’s get started.

Custom RSS feed notification in a widget

As it so happens, alphabetical order is also the order in which our apps will operate for this project.

Part 1 – IF

If you are not a user of the IF Android app already, I would actually recommend proceeding on the web, instead of your Android device. IF is a powerful app that is fairly battery friendly, but there is no point eating juice just for this project. While the procedure remains the same for app and website, the actual process changes a little. I’ll try to show both at the same time.

Open IF, the site or the app, and look for the button to create a new recipe.

For your this trigger, select Feed.

Select New feed item.

Enter your RSS URL, or put ours for the podcast: http://androidauthority.libsyn.com/rss

Click the big blue Create Trigger button.

Now click on that.

Find and select Pushbullet. You may need to enable the Pushbullet channel, which may require you to go create a Pushbullet account so that you can provide IF the required access permission.

Select Push a note. I fully admit that there might be fun and more feature rich things you can do with the other Pushbullet actions, but we just want a simple notification from the service for now.

Change the Title to “New AAPodcast” or something that you can easily remember. You will need to enter this title later in today’s project, so take note of it.

Click Create Action.

Click Create Recipe.

Very good, you may now exit IF.

You would think that the next app to open is Pushbullet – while you do need to make sure Pushbullet is installed, configured and able to access your device notifications (in Android Lollipop you would go to Settings -> Sound & notifications -> Notification access and grant Pushbullet the required access to notifications,) otherwise, there is no need to actually open the app for this project.

Part 2 – Tasker

In Tasker, we are going to need to create 2 Tasks and one Profile today. The first Task sets a variable for Zooper Widget to use, the second Task clears that variable and the Profile is what integrates with Pushbullet to trigger all the activity.

Open Tasker.

Task 1 – Notification counter

Create a new Task and name it something appropriate. I will call mine “NewAAPodcastNotify“.

Tap the “+” to add an action.

Select Variables.

Select Variable Set.

Enter a new Variable name, make sure it is in all caps so that the variable is global. I called mine “%AAPOD“.

In the To section, we want to take our value (which will default to 0) and add 1 each time the Task is fired. To do so, enter the text “%AAPOD + 1“.

Turn on the toggle beside Do Maths. This actually should not be required, but it is better to be safe than sorry.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit this action.

Next, click the “+” button to start another action.

Select Plugin.

Select Zooper Widget.

Tap the pencil to the right of Configuration.

What we are doing is creating a variable specifically for Zooper Widget to read.

In the ZW Variable field, enter a new variable name to be used later from within Zooper Widget. I called mine “AAPOD” to keep it simple, but you might consider calling it something like AAPODZ or ZWAAPOD, just remember to take a note of this variable for later.

Then, in the ZW Text field, enter the previous Tasker variable that you created, including the preceding % symbol. Mine was called “%AAPOD“.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit out of the Task creation.

Do you see how this all works? Every time this Task runs it adds 1 to the value of the Variable, then reports that to Zooper Widget so that it can act on the value.

We will now create your second Task,

Task 2 – Cleanup

This second Task is for cleanup purposes, you can skip this until later, but you will have to eventually come back to it or find a new way to tell your notification to turn off.

Start a new Task and give it an appropriate name, I’ve called mine “ClearAAPod“.

Tap the “+” button to add a new action.

Select Variable.

Select Variable Set.

Tap the tag icon on the right side of the Variable name field and chose your previously created podcast variable, if you recall, mine was called “%AAPOD“.

In the To section, simply enter the value 0.

Click the system Back button to save out of this action. We now need to add another action to the Task.

We will actually be duplicating the ZW variable set action from our other Task, feel free to copy and paste that instead of creating something new here, otherwise:

Tap the “+” again to add another action.

Select Plugin.

Select Zooper Widget.

Tap the pencil to the right of Configuration.

In the ZW Variable field, enter your previously chosen variable name for Zooper Widget. I had called mine “AAPOD” but you might have gone with AAPODZ or ZWAAPOD or something.

Then, in the ZW Text field, enter the Tasker variable again, including the preceding % symbol. Mine was called “%AAPOD“.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit out of the Task creation.

What happens now, when this Task is run it will clear the variable back to 0 and report that variable to Zooper Widget to act upon.

Optional: What app do you use to listen to the AA Podcast? If you want your project today to open that app, now is the time to enter that procedure. In my case, I want to launch SoundCloud when a new AA Podcast is published and this Task is run. Simply create a new action, select App -> Launch App then choose the app you would like to launch.

Now hit that system back button to save and exit.

We will create our Profile now.

Profile – Watch for the Pushbullet notification and take action

Start your new Profile, name it appropriately, if applicable to your setup.

Select Event.

Select Plugin.

Select Pushbullet.

Tap the edit button beside the word Configuration. Enter the values as follows:

If I receive a note

Under Containing the text, replace “Optional filter” with your note from IF, I had entered “New AAPodcast“.

I recommend then dismissing or even deleting the push, but you can leave it, if you want to see the Pushbullet notification as well as our completed Homescreen widget notification.

Tap the check mark in the very top right corner to save the Pushbullet settings, then hit the system Back button to save and back out of the Event editing.

Choose your notification trigger Task, I had called mine “NewAAPodcastNotify.”

That will do it for Tasker, go ahead and back out to your Homescreen. Let’s move on to Zooper Widget. We’re almost done.

Part 3 – Zooper Widget

You may handle this in several different ways, but for today, I am going to create a Zooper widget that displays nothing by default, then it will display an image and text when a new podcast is published. Finally, when I click on that image that popped up, it will dismiss the image and text back to nothing, and open my favorite podcast app to listen to the new episode.

Pull out your creativity cap, it’s time to design a widget.

I will leave you to design a new Zooper Widget and decide how you want it to look. Consider how it will look by default, then how it will look when there is a notification. You will probably want to first set it up as it will appear when there is a notification, then we’ll use advanced code to manipulate it to your default view. Let’s go through that.

As you can see, I have just two elements in my Zooper Widget, a Bitmap and Text. In the designer, I set them up as they would be viewed when there is a notification. If you are also actually building this Android Authority Podcast notification, here, take this image for your design, if you want it.

Let’s add code to hide the elements by default and pop them up when there is a notification. If you are not sure how we know if there is a notification, it was that Variable we set in Tasker – if the Variable is 0, then there is no notification, if the Variable is 1 or higher, then there is a new Podcast, sounds so simple!

Click into the Bitmap image.

Scroll to the bottom and select Advanced Parameters.

Now we enter a conditional statement that tells the image to live in two different spots based on the Tasker variable. if you are following word for word so far today, here is the code you want:

$#TAAPOD#>0?[ox]0[/ox]:[ox]6000[/ox]$

Got it? I know, it’s been a while, so, that string says: If our Tasker variable is greater than 0, display our notification image at position X=0. Else, if the variable is at 0, then we want the image to display at position X=6000, or choose some other ridiculously high number that will put the image way off of the screen.

Hit that check mark to save the Advanced Parameters.

We will now instruct Zooper Widget to clean things up and open our podcast app when the image is clicked.

Select Module On Tap.

Swipe over to Shortcuts.

Select Task Shortcut.

Find and select your Tasker Task that cleans up the variable and launches your podcast app. Mine was called “ClearAAPOD.”

Review your Tasker Task and add an icon in the bottom right, then simply hit the system Back button to save and exit back to Zooper Widget.

We’re done here, hit the system Back button again to save out of the image settings.

Now, head into your Text element.

Scroll part way down and select Edit text manually.

What we do here is have the text element display the value of the variable being sent over from Tasker. The code will be:

$#TAAPOD#=0? :#TAAPOD#$

Take note of the empty space after the “?”

In English: if our variable has a value of 0, show an empty space (which is really just showing nothing,) else, if the variable actually has a value, simply show the value.

Tap that check mark in the top right to save out of the Advanced Parameter, and hit the system Back button to save out of the Text element.

Guess what, you’re all done. Exit out of Zooper Widget and see what you’ve got.

What’s next

I probably don’t have to mention that you are going to need to be patient to see this project in action. Luckily, we record the podcast every Friday and try to publish over the weekend. If you really cannot wait, no worries, head back into Tasker, open the first Task you created today and hit the play/run button in the bottom left corner.

If you have manually run the first Task, don’t forget you’ll need to then run the second Task to clear things up. You should be able to click the image on the Zooper Widget, but you can also manually run it from within Tasker if you run into any issues.

Today’s project can be utilized for any RSS feed, including to collect all Android Authority posts (http://feed.androidauthority.com/) – just remember to open the AA app instead of your podcasting app when you setup the Tasker cleanup Task above.

One last thing, don’t forget that the actions you created here today in IF, through Pushbullet, and in Tasker can be utilized for any other project on your device, or even on a PC and more. IF and Pushbullet both have web and PC (and browser plugin) support, you could easily rig things to receive your notifications on your computer as well as your Android device. If you are interested, try this out for fun: When you click on the Zooper Widget notification, have it pop up a Tasker built window or voice input that allows you to choose whether to open your local podcast app or pass the notification off to your PC. This is all about choice, after all.

Next week

I hope this monster of an Android customization project served as a reminder of the power of these great apps. We are big fans of IF, Pushbullet, Tasker and Zooper Widget, and we hope you are too. Let’s spend a bit more time working around IF again next week, in between the default Android actions and the integration with other great apps and services, I am sure we can find a cool way to do something fancy.

I am sure you guys will point out easier and more efficient ways to handle this same task today, and please do. My goal was for a project that uses all four of these cusomization apps, I kept it as simple as possible, but I’d love to see what differences you would make.

Do you remember at the end of our Android customization project last week, when we finished up making a little voice reminder using Tasker, and I said we’d skip Tasker this week? I lied. Join me as we use Tasker’s HTTP Get tool, along with Zooper Widget, to put a daily joke on your Homescreen.

As always, this project is designed to help us learn a few new tools in Tasker, I hope your customization education is coming along. From there, we want to keep it light, as today is Thanksgiving day in the U.S. This project might take some time to build, but it’s really easy, then you can get back to Black Friday shopping.

Before we begin

Tasker - Google Play StoreTasker and Zooper Widget. For some reason I think I’ve written these words before. You have got to know the drill by now, you’ll need Tasker installed on your modern Android device to follow along today. Tasker is $2.99 and is still and again found in the Google Play Store.

Zooper Widget - Google Play StoreZooper Widget has a free version that might get you through today, but for the full project, or to also enjoy some of our other Zooper Widget tutorials, you’re going to want to drop $2.99 on Zooper Widget Pro in the Google Play Store.

Finally, you are going to want to find yourself a site that offers up quotes or jokes in a relatively simple text format. I have an example below, but you’ll need to find a site, possibly with an API, to get your source material. Read on to see what I’m talking about, but consider not actually building your project until you find your content.

Daily Joke on your Homescreen

Our project will proceed very similarly to previous Tasker/Zooper Widget projects. We will perform actions in Tasker, then we’ll transfer the final data over to Zooper Widget to display on your screen.

The Tasker actions I speak of will be to use the HTTP Get command, much like you may have done in your CMD screen on the PC. We’ll collect a joke from the web, we’ll have to tweak it through variables to strip away extra info, then we’ll save that text into a variable for Zooper Widget.

From there, as before, Zooper Widget will accept the variable from Tasker and simply display the supplied text. You get to choose exactly how you want that info to display. Perhaps you’ll add it into an existing Zooper Widget clock, or create a new widget to get the most out of it.

Finally, we’ll head back to Tasker to create a little Profile that triggers the actions above at least once per day. You may want to wake up to a new joke or quote each day, or maybe you’d prefer a new one every hour, it’s up to you.

Let’s get started.

Tasker HTTP Get

Once you have chosen a site that provides the data you are looking for, the process goes pretty quick. I’ll be using a site that specialized in Chuck Norris one-liner jokes. Not all of them are family friendly, but they’re not too bad. The reason I’ve chosen this site is not so much for the content as because they offer up an API and a simple way to get just a joke in text format. I’ll explain as we go.

Fire up Tasker and head to the Tasks section.

Tap the “+” button to add a new Task. Provide an appropriate name, I’ll call mine “HTTPGetJoke“.

Tap the “+” button to ad your first action.

Select Net.

Select HTTP Get.

Enter the Server:Port as required by your web source. Our provider of Chuck Norris jokes are available if you enter “api.icndb.com/jokes/random“.

Scroll down to Output File and enter the name of a new text file. You can head over to manually add the text file if you want, but Tasker can create it for you if it does not yet exist. Just be sure a file by the name you enter does not already exist, or it will be overwritten.

So, Output File, I’ll enter “DailyRandomChuckNorrisJoke.txt“.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

Now, tap that “+” button to add another action. We need to read that file into a variable.

Select File.

Select Read File.

Under File, enter the name of your text file from above, mine was “DailyRandomChuckNorrisJoke.txt.”

Under To Var, enter a new global variable, I’ll call mine “%HTTPGETJOKE“.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

The result now stored in your variable from the HTTP Get command is a text string with the joke and some extra info. For our needs, we’ll need to strip that extra info.

A sample is as follows:

{ “type”: “success”, “value”: { “id”: 448, “joke”: “When Chuck Norris throws exceptions, it’s across the room.”, “categories”: [“nerdy”] } }

Any idea what to do next? That’s right, we need to use the Variable Split tool to strip away the fluff. Now, you’ll have to carefully identify what characters are required to split the text in the right places. Unfortunately, our example has different characters before and after the actual joke, so we’ll need to Variable Split twice. Let’s do it.

Tap the “+” button to add a new action.

Select Variables.

Select Variable Split.

Under Name, enter your “%HTTPGETJOKE” variable name.

Then, under Splitter, we’ll split on “joke”: “” Note the “‘s within the “‘s and the empty space after the colon.

This time, we will turn on Delete Base. This simply deletes the original variable, which saves RAM usage.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

That helps us clear away the text leading the joke, now to clear the text after the joke.

Tap the “+” button to add the next split.

Select Variables. then select Variable Split.

Under Name, enter the newly created variable from the previous split. For me, that will be “%HTTPGETJOKE2“.

Under Splitter, enter the characters that will split out the joke from the end of the saved text string, that’ll be ““, “” from this site. (That’s quote comma space quote.) Also, that’s not supposed to be an emoji of any sort.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit.

Finally, we save that last split variable into a Zooper Widget variable.

Tap the “+” button to start our last action.

Select Plugin.

Select Zooper Widget.

Tap the pencil icon to the right of Configuration.

Enter a Zooper Widget variable name. Mine will be “HTTPGETJOKE“.

Then enter the final split variable that contains your joke, mine is “%HTTPGETJOKE21“.

Hit that Save button in the top right corner. Then hit the system Back button to save and exit.

Before you exit out of here, be sure to hit that Run Task (Play arrow) button in the bottom left of your screen. It will be much easier in the next stages if you have a joke pre-loaded.

We’re done in Tasker for a bit, time to hit Zooper Widget.

Add the joke to Zooper Widget

I will leave you to follow along previous tutorial or otherwise create a Zooper Widget widget to work with today.

I recommend using a new Rich Text element, as the normal Text element is a little less flexible.

Add your new Rich Text element, feel free to size it up and adjust its location and when you’re ready we’ll add the joke.

Head into Edit text manually.

Enter the value for your Tasker saved variable. Mine will be #THTTPGETJOKE#

Tap OK in the top right to save.

Optionally, you can add another element, or simply use the Module OnTap setting on the text to trigger the Tasker Task again. This way when you tap the text you get a new joke. Pretty slick.

I recommend allowing your Rich Text element to span a maximum of at least 3 rows, depending on your design. I have mine set to 5 rows with font size 12. This adequately covers the width of my screen.

Hit that system Back button as needed to save and exit right out of Zooper Widget.

Look at that, if you’ve done everything properly, you will see a Chuck Norris joke on your Homescreen. Or a motivational quote, if that’s what you chose. I wonder if there are Chuck Norris themed motivational quotes out there?

Optional: Trigger a new joke with a tap of the widget. As you see, I added a Bitmap image as my trigger button.

If you enabled the Module OnTap function, and that is all you want, you are done. Clean up the widget so that it is perfect and go on your merry way. Otherwise, let’s make this thing auto-update every day.

Update it daily

Head back into Tasker, into the Profiles tab.

Tap the “+” button to add a new Profile.

Select Time.

Enter the time of the day you’d like to update. This can be while you are sleeping, or whenever you want.

Enter the same time in both the From and To fields. I’ll use 73. Sorry, I mean 7:30 am.

Optionally, enter a Repeat value if you want more than one update per day.

Hit the system Back button to save.

Choose your HTTPGetJoke Task from the popup list.

That’s it folks. Save and exit and try not to get in trouble with Chuck Norris.

What’s next

We simply slapped this joke onto a Zooper Widget widget on the Homescreen. Don’t forget that you can put it on your Lock screen if you want. We’ve handled the basic procedure before.

Honestly, the hardest part of today’s project is going to be finding a quality web source of quotes and jokes. Things can get very complicated with the Variable Split commands, especially if you are trying to extract a single line of text from a full web page. You can do it, just find the appropriate character string for your Split and don’t be afraid to split several times in a row to whittle down to your content.

Next week

I wish this was a little bit more Thanksgiving themed for you, but I hope this Android customization project to put a Chuck Norris joke on your Homescreen was enough for you. Next week we’ll actually be taking a step back from Tasker, we need to dive into a pretty basic user setting on almost all Android devices, Text-to-speech. This will be a beginner’s level tutorial, just something to help the new Android users get the most out of their device.

What do you think, will Chuck Norris approve of this project, or will he roundhouse kick it right off the internet?

Update (12/22/17): As we told you last week, Zooper Widget, one of the most popular Android customization tools in the Play Store, mysteriously disappeared. Now, just as mysteriously as it left, it’s back. Both the free and paid versions of the app returned to the Play Store today. There’s still no word from the developer on why they were pulled, or how they came to return. The developer, MYCOLORSCREEN, has been silent on social media for years, which isn’t that surprising since the apps haven’t been updated in over two years. 

I guess we’ll just have to settle for it being back without an explanation. If you have any interest in the app, I’d grab it now just in case it leaves again. Zooper is a decently powerful tool that has plenty of third-party support too. Even when the app was gone, searching its name in the Play Store returned numerous results for widgets that leverage Zooper Pro’s platform. 

Hit one of the buttons below to grab the free or paid version. 

Original article (12/15/17): One of Android’s strengths has always been customization. You can download any number of third-party launchers, icon packs, and widgets to make your phone into precisely what you want. In fact, my wife’s Samsung Galaxy S8 looks much more like a Windows Phone than it does what you’d expect to see from an Android device.

While I theme my device far less than my wife, my favorite app to do so has been Zooper Widget. In fact, I enjoy the app so much that I bought for Zooper Widget Pro to support the devs. If you’re unfamiliar with Zooper Widget, it allows you to create intricate homescreen widgets. It also comes with templates, so you don’t have to build your own if you don’t want to.

See also

10 best Android themes

Android themes are changing. They have been over the last couple of years. Back in the day, the rage was all-encompassing theming. One theme would change how home screens, settings menus, keyboards, etc looked. These …

For its versatility and ease of use, Zooper Widget has been popular in the Android theming community, even if it sat idle with zero app updates for a few years. The free version surpassed 1,000,000 downloads, and the pro version had over 100,000 installs according to the Play Store. That is, according to the Play Store before today.

Zooper Widget and Zooper Widget Pro have mysteriously disappeared.

At this point, the reason behind their removal remains a mystery. The developers, MYCOLORSCREEN still have other applications on the Play Store, but Zooper is gone. The devs haven’t posted a response an update on Twitter in a couple of years or anywhere else that we can find.

Did the devs pull the app? Was there a policy violation the developer just didn’t respond to? We don’t know, but we’ll keep an eye on this story and bring you updates as they become available.