Guest HungrySPV Posted March 23, 2003 Report Posted March 23, 2003 Hey Guys, Had a quick newb question on bringing in other information to my homescreen. If I want to use a small app to pull out text from various website and then I want to display that info on the home screen in a little text box (like calender events) is this possible. ie say i wanted to pull a specific share price from a website and want it displayed and updated real time on my home screen can this be done ? I had a search on the archives for Active Homepage but couldn't find what I am after, but if anyone knows of the thread or can advise it would be much appreciated. What I am really after is a homescreen which has a share price with a link, and a few news headlines with a link so it will go straight to explorer. Thanks Kal (looking forward to the April meet !)
Guest Richie M Posted March 23, 2003 Report Posted March 23, 2003 Afraid not m8, unless you or someone else fancies coding a new plug-in to do it, but then again i don't think a HS plug-in would be able to access the net :?
Guest Will Posted March 23, 2003 Report Posted March 23, 2003 During the homescreen design/code webcast, I requested the ability for online graphics to be used on homescreens, and MS seemed to really like the idea.. so this may feature in new updates etc.. or downloadable plugin.dll's Will
Guest fraser Posted March 23, 2003 Report Posted March 23, 2003 You wouldn't want the plugin accessing the net itself. You'd be better with a scheduled process to download the required data and cache it. Then the home screen plugin would access this locally and display it.
Guest Paul [MVP] Posted March 23, 2003 Report Posted March 23, 2003 I've spoken to them about this at length, and their primary concern seems to be the delay while resources are fetched making home screens appear very slowly... P
Guest fraser Posted March 23, 2003 Report Posted March 23, 2003 Paul, my suggestion wouldn't suffer from the delay problem. The best way to do it would be to store the downloaded information into a normal SPV database file. Then when the home screen plugin accesses the data, it will be no different to any of the other things that the home screen currently does, such as missed calls, messages etc.
Guest Will Posted March 23, 2003 Report Posted March 23, 2003 yep, and images from the net would be stored in a tmp location too. Will
Guest HungrySPV Posted March 23, 2003 Report Posted March 23, 2003 Hey Thanks Guys. This is cool, and sound very much possible now. I might have a go at this next week, but might need some help in the 3 stages. 1) Get the info - Using an app (no idea how) or internet explorer (kinda know how) 2) Store it (using your SPV DB idea) 3) Use a plugin to pull the info to Homepage (never done it but should be fun trying) We could use a web services approach. Either I'll have a tiny app in the background shooting off http post info requests to a server somewhere OR I have Internet Explorer set up with a scheduler firing off requests, and basically get back XML responses. So first thing I need are a) To find is if there is a scheduler for the SPV ;) Find a web site where I can easily post requests to get back ie news or share info (must be loads but I've never really needed to pull back specific web info b4 so gonna start looking today) c) Work out how to take info from a webpage response in Internet Explorer and write it to the SPV DB (water reaches neck here !!). Any advice on this guys ? But before I start trying to learn and do this, is there anything I can use to make life easier along the way, or anyone want to help me build this up ? But now it seems totally feasible :) Thanks Kal
Guest madu Posted March 24, 2003 Report Posted March 24, 2003 In theory it does seem feasable. Though considering the architecture of the OS some of it might be times harder than it seems.. Also, I thought this should be moved to Development, but in a dillema.... Hard work beng a mod, you know.. :) Anyway, other mods reading - if you feel that it should be moved, please do coz I can't make up my mind - brain intoxication//////
Guest Monolithix [MVP] Posted March 24, 2003 Report Posted March 24, 2003 Seeing as you can't code your own homescreen plugins (yet), and that no-one seems to know how CE db's work (although i'd assume this is detailed in one of the CE SDK's...), its not particulary feasible, yet...:) It's fine in cust for now imho.
Guest fraser Posted March 24, 2003 Report Posted March 24, 2003 Are there any existing home screen plugins that may be hacked into doing this? As an extreme example, you could use a tool to create an all day appoinment for the data you wish to display, then use the existing plugin to display it. This would knacker the "today" plugin, as you wouldn't be able to use it normally. However, this is just an example, I'm sure there are other plugins more suited to this hack. As for pulling data from the web, XML is where it's at. XML is like HTML, minus all of the HTML specific tags, e.g. , . Just the facts, ma'am, then you use your own tool to extract the bit you need, and display as desired. $100 is an example of the kind of thing you'd be receiving from your post request. Much easier to parse the desired info out. I've not looked into it, but I'm certain there are lots of webpages that give data out like this.
Guest neilfenstein Posted March 24, 2003 Report Posted March 24, 2003 This is all sounding good, but, in the homescreen webcast they said that with such things as timing, scheduling etc that have all been tried, were discarded for the simple reason of processor on time and battery life. The homescreen is interupt driven to give the processor down time and only if something happens ie a call is the homescreen activated. This is the reason that animated .GIFs dont work as there has to be a timing function running to tell the homescreen to move on to the next image!!! :wink:
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now