Widgets

How they stay current#

We fetch what a widget shows and send it along with the schedule the screen already asks for. The screen never contacts anyone for the information itself. Three things follow from that, and all three matter more than they sound.

• It works behind a firewall. Plenty of shop networks allow the player and nothing else. A widget that fetched its own data would sit empty on exactly those screens.
• It works offline. A screen that loses its connection keeps playing from what it was last given, widgets included. Weather carries two days of readings, so it stays right for two days and then says plainly that it is out of date rather than showing a stale number as though it were the temperature outside.
• Forty screens on one feed are one fetch. Not forty requests to the news site every few minutes, which is both rude and the sort of thing that gets an address blocked.

Weather#

• Pick the town from the list. There are Londons in England, Ontario, Ohio, Kentucky, Arkansas and Texas. The list shows the region and the population so you can tell them apart, and what gets saved is the point on the map, not the name — so it cannot drift later.
• Or let it follow the screen. Tick Wherever the screen is and each screen shows the forecast for its own site. One widget for forty branches, and nothing to change when the forty-first opens. The site needs coordinates, which the map on the Locations page fills in; without them that screen shows nothing and says why.
• The clock is the town's own. A screen in Manchester showing Edinburgh's weather shows Edinburgh's time beside it, because the two together would otherwise say something untrue.

News#

You choose the site. Find its feed — most news sites link one from the footer, and it is usually at /feed or /rss.xml — paste the address and press Check. We read it there and then and show you the first stories back, which is how you know you have the right one before anything is saved.

• The latest ten, refreshed every few minutes. The widget cycles through them.
• Feeds differ, which is why you preview. Some give a picture on every story and some none; some give a proper opening paragraph and some give their own navigation menu. What a feed does not carry is greyed out in the list, so you can see what you are getting before you schedule it.
• Nothing is ever invented. If a feed goes down, the widget shows the last stories it was given and how old they are. It does not fill the gap.
• The pictures are the one thing the screen fetches. A story's photograph lives on the news site's own server and we send its address rather than the picture. On a network that allows the player and nothing else, the headlines arrive and the photographs do not — the story then lays itself out without one, which reads perfectly well. Switch Picture off if that is your situation.

Both of them fit the zone#

A widget measures the area it has been put in and lays itself out to suit: a full-screen zone gets the picture and the paragraph, a sidebar stacks them, a footer strip becomes a single scrolling line. There is nothing to configure per zone — put the same widget in three layouts and it will look right in all three.