Introducing: The Widget Stack
Get Useful Info At Your Fingertips Without Sacrificing Screen Space
🎤 For reviewers & press: We bundled all media assets for this update here, feel free to use them.
🔽 We are rolling out this update on Google Play throughout the next days. If you want to download it immediately, please visit our beta channels.
A common request over the years for Niagara Launcher was some sort of way to have multiple widgets on one’s homescreen.
Since our early days, we’ve decided against following our grid-based launcher counterparts and encouraging users to plaster their home screen with many widgets, since that goes against our goal of simplicity.
In the Pop-Up-Date from two years ago, we’ve introduced widgets inside app pop-ups, allowing you to quickly glance at the widgets of your favorite apps by swiping over them.
However, we understand that some widgets are better suited for the regular widget space on the homescreen. But until now, this space has only allowed one widget at a time.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve changed that with Niagara Launcher’s brand-new feature: The widget stack!
Introducing: The Widget Stack
Now you can place up to four widgets on the top of your homescreen and switch between them by swiping left and right, making them easily accessible without cluttering your homescreen.
Adding a Widget Stack to Your Homescreen
If you’re a Niagara Pro user, setting up a widget stack on your homescreen is as easy as long-pressing the calendar widget and selecting “Add custom widget” or alternatively editing your favorites and clicking on “Add widget”.
When trying to add a second widget, instead of replacing the existing widget Niagara Launcher will now offer you to create a widget stack.
To remove or reorder your current widget stack’s items, just uncheck or reorder the widgets in the “Edit favorites” screen.
Don’t have Niagara Pro yet?
Don’t worry. To allow everyone to extensively try the new widget stack, we’ve temporarily increased the duration of our yearly plan’s free trial from 7 days to 30 days.
This offer lasts until the 31st of May.
Adding a Widget Stack to Pop-Ups
If you don’t want to clutter your homescreen with widgets, you can also tuck the widget stacks in pop-ups and pop-up folders — your widgets will only be one swipe away.
This also allows you to, e.g., group all of your smart-home-related widgets in one app pop-up to have them all accessible in one place.
Creating a widget stack in an app’s pop-up is very similar to creating a widget stack on the home screen: Simply add multiple widgets to the pop-up — Niagara Launcher will again automatically offer to create a widget stack.
Upcoming: Two-Column Widget Stacks for Tablets and Foldables
Since most widgets are built with phones in portrait orientation in mind, they often look a bit silly when viewed on wide devices or in landscape mode.
To counteract this, widget stacks will also support the two-column layout we’ve introduced for tablets and foldables in the future and display two widgets side by side whenever this layout is active.
We still have to work on some details before releasing this feature, but we wanted to share a small preview of what we imagine it will look like.
If you want to be among the first to try out the two-column mode when it’s ready, make sure to join one of our community channels on Telegram or Discord to get access to the latest beta versions!
Extending the Opening Hours of the Niagara Arcade
Every year on April 1st, we like to release a small April Fools’ update in our beta channels as a small thank you to our testers in hopes of bringing a smile to their faces.
Last year, we came up with our innovative non-crypto currency named “Niagara Coin”. To acquire it, you can set the swipe-up action of the Niagara Button to “Niagara Coin” and then flip the button up like a coin. While for the past year, this was just a tool to help you master important life decisions, this year, we’ve finally implemented a way for you to spend all of your coins.
This year’s April Fools’ update allows you to throw a Niagara Coin into the brand-new Niagara Arcade machine by flicking it past the screen’s edge. Inserting a coin grants you one round of a famous arcade game with two paddles and a ball right on your homescreen.
Players who reached a score greater than ten were provided with a sense of pride and accomplishment and additionally were granted early access to the new widget stack.
Initially, this game was only meant to serve as an April Fools’ joke, but we’ve decided to still keep it around for a limited time. So if you haven’t gotten around to playing it — now’s your chance!
Quality of Life Tweaks
As always, a new release of Niagara Launcher also includes some smaller changes and bug fixes:
- 🔤 Customizable Text size: You can now resize all text in our launcher independently of Android’s text scale settings. You can do this with the secret command /scale-font (Issue #2094)
- 🖼️ Bigger App icons: You can now increase the size of your app icons even further (Issue #2066)
- 📅 Calendar: If you’re invited to an event but not have accepted, the event gets marked with a question mark in the agenda. Moreover, calendar events with the same start date are now sorted by duration. Finally, we fixed multi-day events not being sorted properly. (Issue #1504)
- 🔔 Notifications: We increased the size of buttons inside notifications to make them easier to tap. In addition, we fixed popup notifications from glitching out (Issue #2192)
- 💼 Missing Work Profile Apps: On some devices, some work apps did not show up (Issue #2219)
- ⛅ Weather Errors: Our weather widget now displays error messages if it fails to load due to factors such as an unstable internet connection. Furthermore, we fixed a bug that mistakenly showed the can’t access your location notice.
A Look at Our Community
In this new category, we want to highlight some posts from our community.
For this first edition, we will take a look at Niagara Launcher running on unusual devices.
This first post is right at home in the new Niagara Arcade.
While we’re unsure if Reddit user /u/holaimscott’s AYN Odin handheld console can run Crysis, it can definitely run Niagara Launcher! This setup looks super stunning, and the lighting really takes this showcase to another level.
/u/holaimscott kindly provided links to the wallpaper, icon pack and font in the post’s comments for those interested in recreating this setup. The only thing left to ask is how to achieve this sick lighting? 👀
If the first setup was too colorful for your taste, then maybe this one suits you better.
Reddit user /u/Wide-Measurement-671 owns a Hisense A9 and managed to install Niagara Launcher on it. The Hisense A9 is a rather special phone because it features a grayscale E-Ink display instead of a regular LCD or OLED one. In combination with Niagara Dots, the resulting aesthetic is extremely minimalist and looks like a fresh print of someone’s homescreen.
If you wish to discuss Niagara Launcher on E-Ink devices further, the post’s comment section might just be the right place!
Continuing the trend of the screen getting smaller with each entry, we want to end this section with the smallest device we’ve come across so far that can run Niagara Launcher in a practical manner.
With their tiny FiiO M6 music player, Reddit user /u/SHYAMz has achieved the highest upvoted showcase post of the past year in the /r/NiagaraLauncher subreddit. We’re pleased to hear that Niagara Launcher’s UI concept works well even on small screens like these!
With the new update, we’ve also included a new option to scale the font independently of the system’s font scale, which could be helpful for small screens like this one.
If you want to know more about this setup, check out the original post by /u/SHYAMz.
Closing words
As always, we hope that you’ll enjoy the new features of this update!
We can’t wait to see all the ways you’ll be using the widget stack, so feel free to show off your setup in our Showcase group on Telegram or the #showcase-and-customization Channel on Discord.
Also, don’t forget to have fun in the Niagara Arcade while it’s still open! The high score in our development team is currently held by me with 42 points — are you able to beat it?
If you’ve got some other feedback, you can share it with us in our Subreddit, Discord Server, or Telegram discussion group. For reporting bugs, please use our issue tracker on GitHub.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned!
— timm0e
