TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

Further to my previous post , I have found XWidget to have a lot of good options for information displays on old Androids. New development of XWidget has reportedly stopped , but the app still works fine.  Rainmeter is (presumably) intended to replace it, but it doesn't (yet) work on Android. The free version allows you to access a fairly good library of free widgets.  If you want the others (such as something from this massive collection by jimking ) you need to pony up a couple of bucks . Despite the developers insistence that it was possible to transfer downloaded widgets to Android, I could not make it work. XWidget would not connect to my phone (yes, I checked the driver). [Update 2019-04-06]:  The .XWP files for Xwidget are nothing more than zip/rar archives.  You can open them directly with WinRAR and extract the working files without the need to install the PC application, as described below. Original text: "My workaround was to unpack/install th...

No shortage of sites telling us we should be re-purposing old phones rather than junking them. I wanted to make a wall clock / weather station.  Easy, right? Nope. Many issues, including: -  The phone did not support a landscape home screen, meaning widgets were out. -  Most weather apps looked like crap. -  Many weather apps also did not rotate into landscape. So, several things to fix.  Very frustrating for what should have been a trivial thing, took much longer than I expected. As I wanted landscape mode, that meant an app and not a widget.  I tried out 10-12 weather apps and was not happy with any of them in landscape; most of them did a bad job of using all the available real estate. Some solutions: 1.  Install Nova Launcher .  This allows most any phone/tablet to have a landscape home screen; it also hides the status bar. (It can't hide the home/back buttons - that's part of the OS.  But it does everything else.) ...