United States of America
Hey everyone I've been thinking about a way to make the home screen more useful...
So I've always had problems with the Media Portal built in weather plugin. To fix this issue I simply use Yahoo Widgets which has a built in weather widget. Yahoo Widgets runs on the desktop, and I have a button mapped on my remote to close Media Portal and show the desktop.
However, it would be really cool if you could get Yahoo Widgets (Or lets say Vista Sidebar Gadgets) to display in Media Portal! I think this could be easily done one of two ways.
1) Make a section of the home screen transparent.
- Doing this combined with a Windows Background that matches the Media Portal skin of choice would allow the widgets/gadgets to be
seen in the media portal home screen without any interaction between the two pieces of software. Simply guess and check placement
of your widgets/gadgets until it looks like it was meant to be!
2) Make a section of the home screen emulate the desktop.
- This would work much the same way that Vista shows a preview for a window that is minimized in the taskbar when you hover over it
with the mouse. Either the entire desktop could be emulated or a specified area of the desktop could be emulated. I think this would be
harder to code but would be the "right way" to do it.
I don't know any forms of code (Unless Matlab and Mathmatica count!!!) but I feel like my logic behind how it would work is correct. Let me know what ya'll think!
So I've always had problems with the Media Portal built in weather plugin. To fix this issue I simply use Yahoo Widgets which has a built in weather widget. Yahoo Widgets runs on the desktop, and I have a button mapped on my remote to close Media Portal and show the desktop.
However, it would be really cool if you could get Yahoo Widgets (Or lets say Vista Sidebar Gadgets) to display in Media Portal! I think this could be easily done one of two ways.
1) Make a section of the home screen transparent.
- Doing this combined with a Windows Background that matches the Media Portal skin of choice would allow the widgets/gadgets to be
seen in the media portal home screen without any interaction between the two pieces of software. Simply guess and check placement
of your widgets/gadgets until it looks like it was meant to be!
2) Make a section of the home screen emulate the desktop.
- This would work much the same way that Vista shows a preview for a window that is minimized in the taskbar when you hover over it
with the mouse. Either the entire desktop could be emulated or a specified area of the desktop could be emulated. I think this would be
harder to code but would be the "right way" to do it.
I don't know any forms of code (Unless Matlab and Mathmatica count!!!) but I feel like my logic behind how it would work is correct. Let me know what ya'll think!