A lot of people have been complaining about the padding in widgets, something that seems to be an android issue, even thought other launchers seem to ‘fix’.

…

This is Lightning launcher! And we can also fix that!

The issue is that the widgets seem to have a margin (20px in my case), and suddenly I thought…why not set the margin of the box of the widgets to -20?

This is not possible with the normal lightning UI…but it is with scripts 😀

When setting the properties, lightning don’t check if they are positive, so you can simply put a negative margin to ‘reduce’ the widgets.

I quickly made this script that lets you easily ‘fix’ a widget running the script from the widget, or even all in a container running the script from the container (it lets you ‘revert back’)

Note: as I said, for me the ‘ghost’ margin is 20px in all directions, you can test and change those values in the script in case you have different ones.

Pierre Hébert​: what about let the normal user set directly negative number in the box?

Can you guess what it does 😉

(The effect will disappear when leaving the launcher, you may want to set it in the resumed event of the desktop, or any item. For android 4.4 or more. Didn’t test a lot)

For me, when a ‘door opens’ and it has a lot of things at the other side, I sometimes get a bit shocked at the beginning, and it takes me time to try and get used to it.

It happened when the ‘Image update’, and specially with the ‘java update’.

Now, thanks mainly to Lukas Morawietz​, but also to the others scripters that published scripts with ‘java code’ I think I can now understand well and make my own ones.

I’m full of new ideas, but with less free time than in the past. So perhaps I will publish some ‘pieces of code’ without a specific use, but that others can use to make a useful script. (I have one to make a notification, another to edit an Intent, another to read the logcat…ask if you are interested)

Enough for now. This post is to share a script, so here it is.

Instructions: set it in the resumed event of an item (use a new shortcut, intent/icon/label will be overwritten)

The script ideally takes the last used app (that is not the launcher) and change the item to be as the app shortcut of that app.

It will take the default icon, no icon packs.

It can be buggy sometimes (I didn’t tested it a lot too), and maybe it throws an error, but I hope not to

The code is a bit messy, and I’m sure it can be improved

It can be modified to show more than one of the recent apps, but it is not implemented. Feel free to do so

Personally I’m using it now in my own screen to change the behavior of the HOME key. It will launch the previous app and the icon is placed under the HOME button (transparent nav bar) [although two more lines of code were necessary]

If you are still undecided to try all this new API features, think as if you can just use almost all android functions, only using the LL.bindClass() where necessary. Also in the java examples where it uses ‘this’ or simply nothing, in most cases you will need LL.getContext()

Thanks again Pierre Hébert​ for this awesome launcher.