Material Photo Widget vs Podcini.X - Podcast instrument
Side-by-side comparison of two open source alternatives
Material Photo Widget
Material Photo Widget is as simple as it can be: a home screen widget to display your favorite photos. It is a free, no-ads, open source alternative for people who want to customize their home screen.Create a slideshow from your favorite photosCreate shortcuts to open other appsPut your schedule on your home screenYour membership passes one tap awayIt's easy and simple to add a new widget with your photos.FEATURESChoose photos individually or sync with device foldersSet an interval or schedule to create a slideshow and switch photos automaticallyYour widgets are shortcuts — customize tap actions for each of your widgets, viewing your photos in full screen, opening an app or URLCustomizable borders, opacity, saturation, brightness, offset and padding to create your perfect home screen6 formats to choose from: Shapes, Square, Tall, Wide, Original and Fill28 different shapesHOW TO USEOpen the app and tap "Create a new widget" directly from the home screen. Add your photos, choose the appearance and behaviors and tap "Add to home screen". That's it!You can also long press on your home screen, open the widget menu and search for "Material Photo Widget", then configure your new widget the same way.MY WIDGET DOES NOT APPEARThe app consumes very little power and runs on the background when needed (to switch photos, for example). Because it's rarely being actively used, it can be stopped by Android as the system prioritizes the most used apps when trying to optimize the battery duration.If you are facing this problem, remove any battery or memory restrictions from the app. You can also search for your device brand on https://dontkillmyapp.com and follow their instructions to improve the behavior of apps that mostly run on the background.Some phones can prevent apps from starting themselves after restarting the device, making the widget can appear broken. If that's happening, you must grant permission for the app to "auto start" through your settings or security app.PERMISSIONSRECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED — This permission is needed to restore widgets after a device restart. Some device manufacturers prevent this from happening, and you must manually allow it through the "auto-start" setting on your phone.SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM (optional) — This is an optional permission that is needed if you would like to use shorter intervals to switch photos, ensuring that they follow the selected schedule exactly.WAKE_LOCK & FOREGROUND_SERVICE — These permissions are used by Work Manager; a standard Android library to manage background work, in this case, used to ensure that the widget keeps functioning as expected.The app does not require any storage permissions. Photos and directories are selected using the native pickers and stored within the app to keep data private and secure. There's no tracking or network communication.Material Photo Widget is an open-source project, find the code and submit feedback at https://github.com/fibelatti/photo-widgetVectors and icons by Dazzle Ui (https://dazzleui.gumroad.com/l/dazzleiconsfree?ref=svgrepo.com) in CC Attribution License via https://www.svgrepo.com/Store listing screenshots were generated with https://screenshots.pro
Podcini.X - Podcast instrument
Podcini, an open source podcast instrument, attuned to Puccini, adorned with pasticcini and aromatized with porcini, invites your harmonious heartbeats. Do I hear your heartbeats? Great! Common functionalities of a podcast player are well-supported: Search, discover and subscribe to podcasts, by keywords, simple RSS URLs, or OPML files. Download, stream or queue episodes, and enjoy them the way you like with adjustable playback speeds. Save effort, battery power and mobile data usage with powerful automation controls for auto-downloading/auto-enqueuing episodes. If the feed contains no media (plain RSS feed), Text-to-Speech engine is used to play the text. Listening progress can be instantly synced through a NextCloud server or across devices in the same Wi-Fi network without a server. So what's special with this podcast app among the many? Well, aside from doing the above well, the following make it stand out: It's open sourced, free to use and free of ads, free as in beer and free as in speech! It takes advantage of modern frameworks to be efficient and conserve energy. In addition to subscriptions, it allows you to create your own synthetic podcasts to compile your interested episodes from various sources to better focus on your interests. While the list of episodes (filtered and sorted by you) in each podcast serves a natural playlist for you, it also empowers you with multiple queues each associable with any podcasts to group similar contents for better listening. On any podcast/episode, you can assign 5 levels of rating allowing you to make better decisions on where to put your attention. You have 12 levels of play states (like to play soon, play again, etc) to better plan and enhance your listening experiences. You can also keep your personal notes with your opinions/comments on each podcast/episode. It has sophisticated sorting and filtering options for you to better select contents. When you unsubscribe a podcast, it allows you to preserve your important episodes of the podcast in a synthetic feed. It keeps a record of your unsubscribed podcasts and notifies you if you unknowingly try to re-subscribe to some. It caches streamed audio for seamless local rewind and replay. You can record audio clips or mark positions on any episodes for better review. You can also set selected episodes related for better grouping. Sure, you can play any episodes in your car's speakers. And, it's not all about audio, video is well handled. You can cast the audio/video to Chromecast speakers/screens. Some other podcast players can also do all of the above? Join the Podcini community! Podcini is under active development by volunteers. You can contribute too, with code, comments or improvements. See source code on github.com/XilinJia/Podcini.X
| Feature | Material Photo Widget | Podcini.X - Podcast instrument |
|---|---|---|
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0-only |
| Install sources | GitHubIzzyOnDroid | F-DroidGitHubIzzyOnDroid |
| Categories | Media PlayerVideo | Media PlayerPodcastVideoBrowser |
| Features | Ad-FreeOpen SourceNo Tracking | Ad-FreeOpen SourceNo Tracking |
| Platforms | Android | Android |
| Website | ||
| Source code |