lockscreen

Jaxbot over at Windows Phone Hacker as released a new app onto the Windows Phone 8 Store and it’s worth the $0.99 for it. The app is called LockWidgets 8 and allows users to add up to three information areas to their lockscreens, including current temperature, tomorrow’s  temp and battery life. Some detailed information is also included like estimated time left on the charge and if it is clear or rainy out.

Users can select the background image from Bing, NASA or their own images and include “weather effects”, which can add rain droplets and presumably other graphical changes to the background image.

Lock Screen Text, we know what you're thinking - just another lock screen app, right? Well, this is a little different than the status quo. Instead of publishing the weather forecast, or displaying the Nyan Cat, Lock Screen Text enables users to input their own text, which is then rendered on the Windows Phone lock screen.

You think I’m just going to sit idly by and let Rich have all the fun with wallpapers? Not a chance. Here are some similar wallpapers to the ones he did the other day, but I would wager raise the bar on minimalism. Just our kickass Windows Phone Central logo set to the background color of your choice.

It may not be an official Instagram app for our Windows Phone, but Instagram Lockscreen does bring the popular photo sharing service to your Windows Phone 8 device.

As you would guess, Instagram Lockscreen lets you set your lockscreen wallpaper with images from Instagram. You can choose image feeds by your favorite Instagram member, your favorite hashtag or just set it to your own Instagram images.

Our favorite app for keeping tabs on our UPS, FedEx and USPS deliveries has received a much wanted feature in its latest update: lockscreen notifications.

That’s right, Package Tracker is up to version 5.1, which we previewed a few weeks ago and it now has the ability to show you when new update notifications are present including detailed information right on your Windows Phone 8 lockscreen. Likewise, you can view the information on the doublewide Tile, should you opt for a more indirect approach.

GasBuddy is a nice Windows Phone 8 app that lets you find gas stations and real-time gas prices from the comfort of your Windows Phone. You can search by keyword or by your current location. The app was recently updated to version three to bring a handful of tweaks and performance fixes as well as Windows Phone 8 support.

The update also brings lockscreen support and offers randomly changing wallpaper images. We'll reserve judgment on the quality of the wallpapers once we see more but the first seems a little on the dark side.

Astronomy Lockscreen is a brand new app now available for Windows Phone. The app (as the name suggests) is a simple concept that pulls down the Astronomy Picture of the Day from the Nasa website. It's able to refresh each day with a new photo of the universe, sending any Windows Phone into another dimension.

We’ve hinted at this before and the leak of the Windows Phone 8 SDK is validating our claim that “Apollo” will allow richer notification support for 3^rd party developers.

Developers will now be able to have their app send notifications to the Lock Screen with the content reflecting the app’s Live Tile:

“In Windows Phone, the lock screen contained a handful of notifications such as the number of new Outlook emails and text messages. In Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview, end users can choose to customize this area with any third party apps they choose. As a developer, you can enable your app to be used in this feature. “

An app can provide content for the following four items on the lock screen:

• The background image. This image is unrelated to lock screen notifications, and is documented at Lock screen background for Windows Phone.
• An app icon
• An app count
• App text