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Adding TouchControl Widgets

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To add a widget to your iOS home screen or Today view, long-press on your home screen background and tap the [+] when it appears at the top of the screen, or scroll to the bottom of the Today view and tap [Edit].  Scroll down in the available apps and tap on TouchControl.  You will be presented with the three available sizes.  You can add as many as you want of any size.  Once you add a widget to your screen, long press on it and select “Edit Widget” from the popup menu.  You will be presented with several configuration options:

 

  1. Activities – This provides a list of the activities in your configuration.  If no activity is selected (which is the default after you add a widget to your screen), it will display the first activities that it finds in your configuration.  The small widget will show one activity, the medium widget will show up to two activities, and the large widget will show up to five activities.  You can select as many activities as you want, but each widget size will only show up to its maximum number of activities.  For example, if you select multiple activities for the small widget, it will only show the first one you select.  For the widget sizes that display multiple activities, the order that you select activities in this view determines the order they will display on the widget, allowing you to manipulate the display order.
     

  2. Button – This is a free-text field that allows you to enter the name of a button to execute after TouchControl launches and loads the selected activity.  The button specified must be physically located on the activity, and the name entered must exactly match the button’s name (case sensitive).  If the button cannot be found, it will fail silently.  For the widgets that display multiple activities, all activities on the widget will attempt to execute the same button name (again it will fail silently if the button is not found on an activity).  This button will execute after any auto exec on-load and/or on-appear buttons have been executed.
     

  3. Show Location – By default the widget only shows the activity name.  Enabling this option will also show the location name for the activity above the activity name.
     

  4. Appearance – This provides several pre-set “themes” for the widget appearance.  “System” indicates the appearance changes with the iOS light/dark-mode setting.  The “Light” and “Dark” settings allow you to force one or the other appearance at all times.  The “Blue” setting uses a blue theme similar to coloring found in the TouchControl app.  The “Image” setting allows you to select an image/photo for the widget background.
     

    • To use the "Image" option, you must first open the TouchControl app, go to Settings -> Tools -> “Widget Backgrounds”, and select up to six images from your iOS photo library to make available as widget backgrounds.  Any images you select there will show up in the image selector in the widget configuration (described below). 
       

    • With the “Image” appearance selected, two additional options will appear:

      1. Image – This allows you to select one of the images from the Widget Backgrounds setting in the app (described above).  There will also be a "TouchControl" option, which will use a modified version of the TouchControl app icon as the widget background image.
         

      2. Blur – This allows you to apply three different levels of blurring to a selected image.
         

  5. Text Size – This option provides several pre-set sizes for text on the widget.
     

  6. Text Color – This option provides several pre-set colors for the text on the widget.  The “System” option uses black text when the device is in light mode, or white text when the device is in dark mode.  The “Clear” option effectively hides the text (useful if using a background image that provides sufficient visual context to identify the widget).

 

Once the selections are complete, simply tap out of the widget configuration and the configured widget will display.  Tap on the widget, or on one of the activity names in a multi-activity widget, and TouchControl will open and load the configured activity, and optionally execute the button if one was specified.  Note that when loading the selected activity, if an instance of that activity is already loaded within the app, TouchControl will simply navigate to it (rather than loading a new instance), and attempt to execute the button on that existing activity, if specified.

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