Hi Everyone!

I want to make a simple desktop widget for Windows that reads GeoRSS feeds from the web and plots out the locations on a Google Map or Yahoo Map. Does anyone have any suggestions as to which widget environment would be best to make this in?

I was originally thinking of doing it as a Yahoo widget, but after investigating that it looks like its pretty difficult to embed html markup into those widgets, thus making it tough to use the Yahoo/Google maps api (The Yahoo! maps widget itself doesn't use the ajax api, and is ~2000 loc! eww).

Maybe it would be best to write this as a standalone widget-like Java Swing app?

if it was me, I would use Flash. There is a component from AFComponents called G_map (google maps in flash) very easy to use. Then to create the standalone, a tool like MDM Zinc will do the job.
Both websites have support forums with many users.

salut!

:: Games Garden ::

I like your suggestion, and I'll take a good look at those tools. The only thing is I am not very familiar with flash, so that would be a bit of a learning curve. Do you have any suggestions for a desktop widget environment that could pull the feeds and render the Map in HTML using Google/Yahoo's AJAX api?

I would have a look at Adobe AIR. By the way, I would love to see your widget when finished

salut!

:: Games Garden ::

I took a look at Adobe Air last night, and it looks very cool - I think I'll give that a try. Also, it should give me a chance to start learning some flash.

Thanks!

I'll let you know when I finish : )

well, just in case, to build AIR applications you don't need to learn flash, that's one of the reasons why it is cool, you can build AIR using html, javascript or flash & is cross-platform...

salut

:: Games Garden ::