As I said recently… I love my users!

Someone just contacted me about something which, unfortunately, cannot be done the way that it was presented. The user wanted me to make it so that when Auto Respond is on, the icon on a home screen shortcut would be green, and when it’s off the icon would be red. This icon cannot be changed dynamically like that (and if it can, I haven’t figured out how to do it yet) because the icon is actually hard coded into the app.

The good news is, there is another way to go about getting this functionality – and that is to make another widget! This widget would be available to both free and paid users, as it would not have any functionality that bypasses ads. I am going to call it the “Auto Respond Status” widget.

Basically, it will look like the message widgets: an app icon and some text. In this case though, the text will always be “Auto Respond”, and the icon is linked to the global status of Auto Respond, not the status of an individual message.

Clicking on this widget will simply open the app, just like a shortcut (dragging the icon from your app drawer to the home screen) would. But unlike that shortcut, the widget will show you whether or not the app is enabled by displaying a color coded icon.

I have not begun work on this widget yet, as I just received this request a few minutes ago. But I don’t think this will take me a lot of time. Much of the code from the message widget can be reused for this one.