More widget customization options
The most important building blocks of start.me pages are widgets. No wonder we get a lot of feature requests from people who want to customize their widgets. Thus far, most of the customization options allowed you to change the functionality of the widget. Today’s release gives you more control over the widget’s looks. You can now change the color and transparency of widgets individually. When you try it, you will see this opens up tons of new possibilities!
Widget background
So far, there was no way to make specific widgets stand out. We added a ‘Background’ tab to the settings dialog of all widgets to change that. Apart from the default white background, you can select one of 9 background colors to make some widgets stand out more. The colors have been picked to be both distinctive and work well with the overall design of start.me widgets.
We introduced transparent widgets quite a while ago already. The transparency of widgets can be set for the entire page. In some cases, that setting is a little too coarse and it would be preferably to be able to set widget transparency individually. So we added a new setting to allow per-widget tuning of transparency. You can still set a global transparency value for all widgets on a page, but choose to set a different transparency level for one or two specific widgets. Great if you want some widgets to blend in with your background image.
Some other new options
Apart from these really cool background settings, we also added some widget specific settings. The Notes and Twitter Timeline widgets now support a configurable height, allowing you more control over the look of these widgets. For the Notes widget, this means you can have long texts displayed in a relatively small space.
The email widget now supports custom IMAP, so that you are not limited to the providers we offer: by simply specifying your own email server’s IMAP details, you can integrate email from whatever source you want!
And finally, we made a new widget available: the Profile widget. This widget offers a nice way to describe yourself, your organization of something else you like. A photo can be attached to the description as well as links to Twitter, LinkedIn, et cetera. You can see some examples on our about page.
We hope you like the new customization options and would like to invite you to share with us some of the pages you have made using the new customization settings!
Reorganized widget settings
Oh, before we forget: we reorganized the widget settings dialogs, making common settings easier for you to find. The widget’s title and icon can now be changed directly through the settings dialog, providing you with one clear place to go for customization settings. We hope you enjoy!
7 Replies to “More widget customization options”
First, thanks for your system! I use it everyday, and find it very useful for me and my students.
I have a question about the Profil widget. How can I do to change logos in front of information (location for example)
Thanks!
Hi Dav,
In the future we’ll make these icons configurable for the user. For now you can email us at support@start.me and we can manually set these icons for you.
Best regards,
Luuk
start.me
Many thanks for the nice update – keeps getting better & better. Please don’t forget to add an option to change or disable the Alt+Shift shortcut, because it messes with the Windows language-switch shortcut.
This would have made me extremely happy, except you chose horrible, pastel-like colors – something I’ve tried to avoid everywhere & is sadly extremely popular with apps. I think you should include some darker or more deep/solid colors to satisfy those of us who hate pastels. It would have made more sense to just let us have a way to customize the boxes with any color we choose. You could even just supplement the current new settings with a custom hex box for color entry for those of us who know how to do it, & if you feel the need to simplify the interface, just put an “advanced” link that upon clicking, displays the box? You took a step in the right direction, but I’m afraid this is pointless since the entire reason for wanting color options is due to the fact bright white sucks so much. Bright anything else sucks, too. So A+ for effort, but D- for implementation. 🙁
Thank you for the A+. We really appreciate that. Sorry to hear you don’t like the pastels. But rest assured, we are planning on extending the colors and possibly adding support for free color selection. There are some technical issues we have to solve first, however.
Hi Qua. You may be pleased to here we added some extra background colors for you to choose from. Free selections will follow later.
Love the profile widget! I’ve been wanting something a little more robust than the notes for a while and you guys delivered!