Brett Robinson’s Blog

The other day I was trying to tweak my homescreen on my SDA. I’m not fond of how it is setup and would prefer to have different items on the screen and in a different order. One thing that I was really looking for was a way to add another clock with a different time zone to my homescreen (and not have to buy a component for it). So, this had me poking around on a way to do it and I found a way to re-arrange the homescreen layout by building images and defining the x and y coordinates on where smartphone components would go. The thing is that you can place items wherever on the screen, but they HAVE to be defined as an element already in the smartphone OS. So, in order to get the clock, you specify and give it attributes for year, date, etc. But, that’s all you can do with the clock element. So I thought - there’s all these pc desktop widgets around, yahoo has them and microsoft has them…now, why can’t a smartphone have a similar system that you can supply widget code that fits a particular format that will run on the homescreen? You can write a homescreen element in c++, but the guy who had coded it up on the internet said it was a pain to work with. So it is possible to do it but it seems like it will be very time consuming - and I would rather have some sort of “widget engine” on the smartphone that you can plug in custom pieces that people write. Maybe I should start a codeplex project? Does this sound like a good idea to anyone?

Here’s some images I prototyped: