Erk...yes, I've had this sort of thing running for quite a while.
It's really quite easy - just look at the HTML source of the pages with the images you like, then make a subclass of ImageMorph that polls that address on a regular basis to load the latest image. In your variant, you'd hold onto the last 6 images and cycle them.
At the risk of mentioning exobox yet again, we did similar stuff with news, weather, sports, stocks etc. by using the old Pointcast (later EntryPoint, now Infogate) feeds. Most of these systems delivered their data in XML (!!) and creating a viewer for top headlines, photo of the day, etc was usually quite simple.
Of course, cherry picking content without ads from some of these sites might bother them.
Other cool web-data-driven toys could include "where's the International Space Station right now" or "where are the latest earthquakes happening". At exobox we also talked about expanding on the fast sphere rendering code I posted a while back to act as a directory for webcams and other geographic kinds of stuff.
-- Duane
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Ingalls" Dan@SqueakLand.org To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 4:52 PM Subject: Weather maps?
Folks -
We now have access to network spelling correction and translation in
Squeak. Something else I like to see sometimes is an animation of the last 6 weather satellite images of my area at 1/2-hour intervals. Weather.com provides this nicely, but it would be even nicer to have it in Squeak, and separate from all the ads and inaccurate forecasts. Plus it galls me that they don't cache the background image of the ground (I think) -- it should be able to ship the precipitation overlays in just a couple of seconds, but it seems to take quite a long time.
Anyone know enough to put this together?
TIA
- Dan