[Zooper Widget General] Henderson42:
Using Bluestacks To Create Zooper Widgets

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Prerequisites:

You must have Bluestacks and Zooper Widget. You can download Zooper Widget (or Pro, which you'll need to import them personally later on. If you are just making designs for other people then you don't need pro as far as I am aware) from the Play Store then just get it from /data/app using a root-enabled file explorer of your choice and copy it to your computer. I personally was getting a lot of problems with the latest version of Bluestacks when downloading things from the Play Store. I resorted to using an older version, which can be found here (v0.8.11.3116). In accordance with the guide I followed to root Bluestacks which can be found here. That guide will cover pretty much all of the installing and rooting of Bluestacks. Now I couldn't get onto the Play Store on this one either but I was able to download Nova Launcher's Stable APK and install it before I rooted Bluestacks and removed all the bloatware on it.

As you are reading this I'll assume you've used Zooper before to create a widget and so I shan't go into any detail about how to use it, however I will say that, before delving into this you should note down some things about widgets you've made previously, mainly their width and height. As bluestacks is always in portrait mode you'll want to know what values to set for it to fit your phone as it should. At least in my experience.

If you intend to import fonts etc. into ZooperWidget you will also need to get ES File Explorer, yet again the only way I could get this from a reputable source was to download it from the Play Store on my phone, find it in /data/app and copy it to my computer.

Another thing you should have before going any further is to get the DropBox apk - and an account - to get your .zw files off Bluestacks and onto your phone ready to be imported (if you have Zooper Pro).

Resources Recap:

Bluestacks v0.8.11.3116 - To run Zooper Widget

Zooper Widget - Self Explanatory

Rooting Guide - In-depth guide to Root Bluestacks

Nova Launcher - My choice of Launcher for Bluestacks (N.B. not tested any others, so feedback would be nice)

DropBox - To upload you .zw files for import elsewhere (I assume any cloud app would work)

ES File Explorer - To install fonts etc. to Zooper Widget

Setup

First of all I'd recommend creating a folder on the desktop named "Zooper for Bluestacks" or the likes. As Shown: (I had not yet copied over the ES File Explorer app)

Keeps everything neat and proper. Once you've downloaded all the APKs needed the followed the rooting guide - hopefully successfully because if I can do it anyone should be able to, however if you're having difficulties feel free to ask me but I feel the guys on the Root Guide thread will be of more assistance - then you simply need to double click on the ZooperWidget.apk and DropBox.apk and ES File Explorer.apk and all should be well. Simply go onto Bluestacks and open the Zooper Widget app. Make your widgets - keeping in mind to take a quick note of Height and Width for your phone - and upload them to DropBox from Bluestacks. When you download them to your phone and import them make sure to check that scaling is set to 100% so that the widget appears as intended.

One final point, if you intend to have clickable modules I suggest you do your final tweaking on your phone and just use Bluestacks for the bulk of the design work as you'll want to make sure you're linking the module to an app/action/widget that your phone can carry out that may be missing from Bluestacks or vice versa.

Problems:

Really the only problem I've come across is that I can't get Bluestacks into portrait mode, however I've not looked anywhere to see if there is a guide to do it. If I get round to it I'll update the tutorial.

You can change the resolution of Bluestacks if you're comfortable with RegEdit. You must kill all Bluestacks processes then you need to run RegEdit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Bluestacks/Guests/Android/0 in here there are setting for Width and Height. Change these to the desire size in a 9:16 ratio. I am using 700x394 for my laptop which has a 1366x768 display. You will also need to ensure that if you removed bloatware earlier that you do not disable or remove App Settings as you'll need this to make Nova Launcher launch in portrait mode. Set the mode in App Settings for Nova Launcher to "Default" and this will change it so that it's portrait mode. As I use Nova Launcher on my phone as well I simply changed the Nova settings so that the Desktop Grid was the same as my phone - I am not sure how this will work if you use a different launcher. For me the NavBar disappeared and I had to use the 'Esc' to get in and out of Apps and stuff. I am still messing about with this to get it working so I'll update again if/when I get it working fully as intended.

Too many problems with this. Found it easier to just stick to knowing what Height and Width to use.

Thanks:

Thank you to you first of all for reading my first tutorial which is basically just a compilation of other tutorials.

And Thanks to:

codelover for their lovely comprehensive guide to rooting Bluestacks.

Thanks for reading, I hope this helps some people that are fed up of making Zooper Widgets on their phones and I hope that I've not missed anything out. If you feel anything is unclear or would like to suggest improvements please do so. Also I sincerely apologise to anyone I've undeservedly left out of the thanks bit, feel free to shout at me if you feel you've been let down. I've attached the terrible sample .zw I made in Bluestacks, if you do download it for whatever reason, the circle module isn't clickable as I don't have a messenger app on Bluestacks.