The N97 has a great new feature called Homescreen widgets.  I thought I'd write a little here about what they do and what is involved in developing them.

So yesterday we announced that we have just released 4 homescreen widgets for the N97 and here they are shown in the screenshot below...

These widgets show the latest news for each subject area  which in order above are News, Celebrity Gossip, Gaming and Tech News.

So you may ask what can homescreen widgets do?  They can show dynamic content on the homescreen.  In our case every 6 seconds we show a different story.  The widgets can be written in C++ or HTML/Javascript and CSS - guess what the latter is much easier and that's what we use.  Each widget is just an area of the screen - in our case 312 pixels wide by 91 pixels high.  The graphical elements are just layered on this canvas and the content can be changed in anyway you like.  There are just two restrictions:

1. Flash content is not allowed (which is a shame)
2. Any programmed interaction with the screen is translated into a single event to run the widget in full screen mode - so don't bother putting any links on the home screen they will not work.

So that just leaves you with issues when writing these things.  The biggest issue is battery life and the biggest consumer of battery is going online.  So you need to ensure all the content is cached and it does not need to go online continuously to get content.  Fortunately Javascript has an object called Image which can store binary content and we use this to show the content on the homescreen.  We only go online every 30 mins to check for the latest internet content (the user can change this value though.

Finally there's one extra trick we perform.  WRT technology allows the storing of text content on the memory card, so we ensure all the text content is saved all the time.  This means that if you go on a plane and have to switch your phone off, then when its back on in offline mode the application still works seemlessly.  So you can always use this application and no matter what you do there is always something interesting for you to read.

Now all you developers out there may be asking how all this was done under the covers and for you the great thing about WRT is that you can read all my source code inside the application to see how I did it (although please take note of our copyright statement)- sorry if am a bit untidy sometimes :-(

All 4 widgets were submitted to Ovistore at the same time but only 1 made it to live so far (they told me they are very busy), so for now I've provided some links below and when Ovistore does publish all of them I'll remove these links from this story.

Downloads for Nokia N97, 5800 / 5530 (NB only N97 has the homescreen functionality, but it runs on all 3)

• Download News Buzz widget

• Download Gossip Buzz widget

• Download Gaming Buzz widget

• Download Tech Buzz widget