Do you use active desktop?

[Guest Paul [MVP]]

If so, here's an Active Desktop element that updates every 5 minutes (please verify), and displays the 5 most recent posts.

Suggestions for improvements etc. welcome as always!

Add the following as an AD item:

http://www.modaco.com/desktop.php

P

[Guest casper508]

Ten minutes and counting. It shows "Last Updated 02 Mar 2003 05:51 am"

No change. Had to do a manual refresh and the time changed accordingly.

[Guest Paul [MVP]]

Weird - will investigate refresh, and incorrectly formatted dates!

This is currently BETA! :)

P

[Guest casper508]

Would it be possible to have a setup where the page updates automatically once five new messages have been posted rather than every 300secs?

[Guest Paul [MVP]]

Not really, that would require a 'push' method of some description...

P

[Guest amo]

I dont normally use active desktop. Would do though if this makes it through beta or into a functional beta at least

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

I've hated active desktop with a vengence since win98, but i'm willing to give it another go for the sake of modaco...:)

[Guest Will]

every so often it goes to a forum view.. but nice!

'so this is what active desktop is for?'

The only use of it before was as a reason for 98 crashing!

Will

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

Yeah i noticed that too, and the timestamp was 5pm :/

Nice idea, but it'll be better once its working properly :)

[Guest HelloDave]

I had a go at making an Active Desktop a few years ago while I was learning javascript; the idea was to put a little notepad, clock, to do list etc on the desktop, and it worked fairly well but slowed my P233 to a crawl so I gave up with it in the end!

If anyone's interested have a look at http://desktops.webhostme.com (site's a bit out of date though)

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

That is the problem with active desktop. Plain wallpapers alone are enough to slow all but the fastest PC's to a snails pace, active desktop was pretty much enough to slow Win98 down so much it just fell over/took 30mins to boot. :)

[Guest Chris b.a.r.f.]

Come on Mono, you're being a little unreasonable - my old Win98 machine takes *max* 20 minutes to boot with a 2.5kb gif as a desktop. :wink:

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

I just noticed that was you after reading your posts elsewhere all day Chris, like the new avatar ;p.

And admittedly 20 minutes is quite impressive....:)

[Guest Chris b.a.r.f.]

aye, the old cat-skeleton's served it's avatar time. Time for a bit of Barmy Army instead :) (The Exploited, for you knowlessmen)

You wouldn't be laughing at Win98, would you Mono? ;)

Had to install a load of network stuff on a mate's Win98 system the other day, what a flippin' nightmare. XP Pro, I want to have your babies. Sort of.

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

Me? Never, i was an avid user for about 5 years...until ME came along (it ~did~ agree with my hardware o/)

And as it happens i got my XP home laptop talking to a ME desktop over a workgroup quite happily, even if WinME's auto DHCP config is a little....random...

[Guest Chris b.a.r.f.]

I never realized how good software could be until I got XP Pro. I must confess I've never really used WinME in anger, only on a friend's Toshiba Laptop where it seemed to do OK until he replaced it with Win2000 Pro (another stillborn MS OS that never really made the grade, then :) )