We have regular hack days at The Guardian. (They actually tend to be pairs of days, but we still call them “hack day”.) These are a great opportunity to build something completely different or explore a new idea. However, I decided to use this particular hack day to throw together a feature I wish we had in the Android app: home screen widgets!

The first thing I built was a latest news extension for DashClock. DashClock has a really nice API, so the whole thing was finished in a couple of hours.

I also made made a resizable home and lock screen picture widget. There was a positive “can we keep it?” conversation with the project manager, so this will probably find it’s way into a future release.