Android Widgets are applications that can run the desktop of the phone. Popular ones are Facebook feed, Pandora and stuff like that. They are a bit challenging because they need to be optimized to minimize utilization because of battery issues and stuff like that.
There are basically two actionable items. The first is the green dot and the logo will get the phones current GPS location and update the score on the right hand side. The second is the score which if tapped will open to walkscore websites full page. The website page is a bit slow but it is functional.
The walkscore API was easy to use the tricky parts have been the widget lifecycle and making sure not to use to much battery. There seems to be bugs I am bumping into a lot over the last 18 hours but I have made a couple updates but that is somewhat expected.
During the time that the GPS and score are being retrieved then the display changes to a retrieving icons. This lets the user know that the application is working. For a while I was thinking about doing an autoupdate. First the battery usage is a bit excessive. Second this isn't that useful because the user will need to be looking at the phone and a majority of the time the user will not even have there phone on. Finally I have a limited quota to how many walking scores I can do in a day and the autoupdate one phone could consume almost all of them.
If you have an Android phone and can do me a favor and test it out that would be great just search for "walkscore" in the Market and it should come up. Hopefully I will eventually get access to the full API and can build a cool mapping layered one.
Off to work on my next app.
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