All of our users are going to notice a new HD Widgets update this week. This is a required update to migrate our users over to a new data connections for one of our weather services. We're still using WeatherBug and Accuweather but we're just using a different way to connect with one of them.

Most of you guys have already made this switch - we just need to get the stragglers. It's pretty much due to weather alerts that we were checking every half-hour resulting in over 12 million hits a day. We've reduced that to ~3 million but it's still too much. This problem only affects old versions of HD Widgets.

To make this easier for everyone we added a few perks. First off, we realized that we never actually wired up the notification settings and preferences for HD Widgets when we migrated the code over from Cloudskipper. With this release the app will recognize your settings.

We've had a lot of requests for a Clock widget so we added ten new layouts. We modified the Weather Activity to check for updates as soon as you open it, which is super practical (i.e. just click the weather icon). We fixed the ringer switch (it was reversed). And finally I added a green background because someone asked for it.

We've been working with a few design studios to create new themes for the 3.0 release. We're expecting to introduce at least two new themes with the launch of 3.0 and we have three more themes already designed and waiting on development. I included a sneak peak of the new ICS theme in the screenshot above.