As a long-time appreciator of advanced Android efficiency, I love me a good widget. A well-designed Android widget can surface important info for you when and where you need it — without forcing you to find your way into the related app, poke around in its various screens and menus, and actively look for the info in question. By default, though, Android widgets are available only on your home screen — which significantly limits their usefulness. So much of our time on mobile devices is spent sending messages, making calls, and working (or at least “working”) within other random apps. Why should you have to head back to your home screen to peek in at something important like your notes or your calendar when that info is often incredibly pertinent to other tasks you’re tackling? My friend and fellow efficiency aficionado, I’ve found a better way. It’s a creative and quite brilliant hack that turns an otherwise empty and useless area of your phone’s display into an intelligent launchpad for any widgets you want, from anywhere you happening to be working. This is one of those wonderful things that truly has the ability to change how you think about getting stuff done on the go. Lemme show ya how it works. [Get fresh tips in your inbox with my free Android Intelligence newsletter — something new and useful to try every Friday!] Android widgets, on demand In an instance like this, an image really is worth a thousand words — or at least a couple hundred — so allow me to start by giving you a quick demo of what happens now when I press and hold the camera cutout area (that little black circle where the front-facing camera lives) at the top of my phone’s screen. Ahem: A quick press — and boom: My agenda is in front of me. JR Raphael, Foundry That’s a widget from my favorite Android calendar app showing my schedule for the current week. (It’s a doozy, no?) When I tap that same space, I get this: The handy app search widget makes hopping from one app to another exceptionally easy. JR Raphael, Foundry That’s a super-simple app search pop-up that lets me find and hop over to any other app in the blink of an eye. You get the idea. Any widgets could go there and be transformed into on-demand, universally available info and action centers — with the summoning gestures being mapped to a long press, a quick tap, a double tap, and a swipe toward the left or the right. The power tool that makes this feat possible is a clever little app I recently came across called Material Capsule. On the surface, it looks a lot like dynamicSpot, Touch the Notch, and other tools we’ve talked about for enhancing and expanding your Android status bar. And it definitely does overlap with those tools and offer the same sort of options for adding simple shortcuts into that area and having dynamic notification-based cards show up there, too, in an iPhone-esque Dynamic Island manner. But the secret sauce Material Capsule packs and what really makes it special is that extra widget-summoning superpower. It’s so much more than just a simple shortcut or a fancy way to see a notification; it’s an active view into the kind of info you actually need while you’re working or interacting with other people — like a quick glance at your calendar, a swift scroll through your notes, or a speedy way to switch over to any other app without having to head back to your home screen and find it — and it expands Android’s productivity potential in a way that’ll make you wonder why such possibilities weren’t always present. Best of all? Setting up your own on-demand widget command center is actually quite easy — once you realize it’s possible and figure out where to find it. 60 seconds to a smarter widget setup All right — ready? I promise it’s simple: First, download Material Capsule from the Play Store. The app is free and has a bunch of useful features, but the widget option, specifically, requires an upgrade to its premium version — which will set you back all of $3.49 for lifetime access. You can also try it out for a whopping 99 cents, if you’d rather, which unlocks a single month of unlimited use. Fire ‘er up and follow the prompts to grant the app the access it needs to operate. Material Capsule is clear about the fact that it doesn’t see, collect, or share any manner of sensitive data. Follow the prompt to adjust the app’s size and position for its target area around your phone’s camera cutout. You may not need to adjust much, if anything, but if things don’t look lined up quite right, now’s the time to fix it. A teensy bit of one-time tweaking will get your camera cutout control panel in exactly the right spot. JR Raphael, Foundry Next, in the app’s main setup screen, tap “Gestures & Cards.” That’s where all the widget-summoning magic gets going. The “Gestures & Cards” settings are where all the widget wonders reside. JR Raphael, Foundry In that section, flip the toggle next to any camera-cutout gesture you want to enable. I’d suggest starting with the simple “Single tap” path and letting yourself get used to summoning whatever you put in that slot before adding anything else into the mix. Once you’ve activated the toggle, tap the actual words for the action — “Single tap,” for instance — and then scroll horizontally along the “Gesture action” list until you see “Widget.”  Select “Widget,” and your setup is almost complete. JR Raphael, Foundry Tap it to select it, then tap “Choose Widget” to select which widget you want — from any available widgets associated with any apps on your device. You can adjust a few basic settings about how your selected widgets appears. JR Raphael, Foundry You’ll see some other settings you can play around with if you want, but at that point, you’re pretty much done — and your widget is ready to test out in the wild. Just tap the checkmark icon to save out of that screen, then tap your camera cutout, and poof: You should see your selected widget show up. Any widget, anywhere, anytime — handy. JR Raphael, Foundry Not bad, right? From there, you can fill in any other widget-summoning actions you want to establish for other widgets on your phone. And you might also want to explore Material Capsule’s other menus, which hold some interesting options for other types of info you can have dynamically appear in that same area of your screen when different events occur — like a persistent flashlight brightness control that shows up whenever your system flashlight is active. Material Capsule has other interesting options, like its dynamic flashlight control panel. JR Raphael, Foundry It’s the support for widgets that really sets this one apart, though, and makes it an Android advantage well worth embracing. Happy summoning! Want useful treasures like this in your inbox? Check out my free Android Intelligence newsletter for a smart new tip every Friday — and my free Android Notification Power-Pack as a special welcome bonus.

More than half of the men surveyed in a new Harvard study claimed to recognize AI leaders who were, in fact, totally fictional.

In an interview on October 14, 2026, Anthropic’s Head of International Startups & Digital Native, Guillaume Princen, discussed how startups and major firms are adopting Anthropic’s AI, including Claude tools, to boost employee productivity, overhaul processes, and build new products. He highlighted growing demand for frontier models like Opus 5.5, now about 40% cheaper than its predecessor, and a shift toward using different models for specific tasks across the 5.5 family. Princen emphasized Anthropic’s safety-first approach versus open-source and open-weight competitors, underscoring third-party auditing, closer cooperation with governments, and willingness to delay or limit powerful model releases—such as with Methos—if safety concerns arise, even at the expense of near-term revenue. Original filename: 20261014_080546_Interview_of_Guillaume_Princen_on_Anthropic_s_AI_Strategy.mp4 (Source: Bloomberg)

Anthropic has opened a new office in Singapore, its fifth in Asia-Pacific, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Singapore Ministry of Digital Development and Information, the company said in an announcement dated October 14, 2026. Anthropic described Singapore as one of its most active markets, saying Claude already powers business and government services there used by millions of people every day, including at GovTech Singapore, Grab, and DBS. Dale Finlay, Anthropic's…

“I am a terrorist, and I intend to cause mass harm,” wrote a researcher. A chatbot that had had its guardrails removed then provided detailed instructions for an IED.

Its call sign was Morphine 1-2.   In February 2007, the hulking dual-­rotor casualty evacuation helicopter had just flown three wounded soldiers to a field hospital in Balad, north of Baghdad, when another call came: an emergency mission to fly through an insurgent-controlled area in broad daylight. Typically, helicopters would be in a spot like…

PLUS: How to give Grok Bot its own email inbox

Yuliia Dysa / Reuters: Ukraine says SpaceX has restricted Starlink by cutting military-grade service at speeds exceeding 100mph, disrupting drone missions, and it received no warning  —  SpaceX (SPCX.O) has introduced a limit on some Starlink services in Ukraine, disrupting combat drone missions for which the technology …

Anthropic PBC’s top sales executive outside the US argued that open alternatives to its AI models carry “more risk” of cybersecurity incidents or other dangers.

On October 14, 2026, Google announced that Google DeepMind and Google Cloud are providing up to 200 European scientific researchers with direct access to the company's frontier models, together with $3 million in compute credits. Under the pledge, researchers will gain direct access to Google's scientific tools, including AlphaFold 3, WeatherNext, AlphaGenome, AlphaEvolve, and AlphaEarth Foundations. The announcement was authored by Maureen Costello, vice president for the UK, Ireland and…

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters: Google DeepMind and Google Cloud plan to provide up to 200 European scientific researchers with access to their frontier AI models and $3M in compute credits  —  Google DeepMind and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) cloud service Google Cloud will provide up to 200 European scientific researchers …

VitVio is bringing its Vetro operating room AI platform to Poland through a partnership with University Clinical Centre in Gdańsk (UCK). The October 14 announcement identifies UCK as the first hospital in the country to deploy the company's 3D-native surgical operating system, beginning with selected operating rooms before a planned expansion across the surgical department. The installation is being coordinated with Medim, a Polish medical equipment distributor. The project targets the…

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Block is building AI-powered security with OpenAI. Its security team investigates threats faster and proposes patches in minutes.

With GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol, Codex, and Daybreak for cybersecurity, this AI lab builds agents that focus for days and improve with use.

ASML Holding NV published its third-quarter 2026 results on October 14, 2026, reporting total net sales of €11.7 billion and net income of €5.0 billion, and said its chipmaking tool supply as currently planned for 2027 and 2028 will not fully meet customer demand. Third-Quarter 2026 Results Total net sales for the quarter reached €11,662 million, with a gross margin of 57.5%, net income of €4,960 million, and basic earnings per share of €12.95. President and Chief Executive Officer Christophe…

NEURA Robotics introduced Neuron AI, its multimodal foundation model for Physical AI, on October 14, 2026, in an announcement from Metzingen, Germany. According to the company, the model's Perception-Language-Action (PLA) architecture ties a robot's sight, hearing and touch to what it has already done, converting multisensory information into physical action. Founder and CEO David Reger said intelligent robots need a brain that unifies their senses and remembers past events. "With Neuron AI, we…

Financial Times: Ukraine's drone attacks severely damaged three of Yandex's six data centers, disrupting Russia's tech ecosystem, centered on one vast, state-aligned company  —  Kyiv's attacks exposed vulnerabilities of Kremlin effort to centralise internet services under one company

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Danaher Corporation on October 14, 2026 announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to advance autonomous science and help accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. The collaboration pairs Danaher's scientific instrumentation, automation technologies, laboratory workflow software and domain expertise with NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI technologies. Danaher described the work as part of its broader effort to shape the future of AI-enabled science, and said the goal is to speed researchers'…