You would not believe my surprise when after spending the whole of Sunday building my first gadget for the QLD vista competition someone had beat me to it!
Well, mine maybe the 2nd but it has some great features and worth a download:
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=fd7fd7af-32e4-43b9-bbf3-3cf9233f0117
It is build based on the Vista slideshow gadget, I have resized the undocked window to show the full resolution of the main 6 brisbane cameras. The settings allow you to stay on the default slideshow of all 15 cameras or you can set it on one (updates every minute). Clearly you need an internet connection to get this to work.
One of the great things about gadget is you can run multiple instances of them. So for example I could run 4 of this gadget with each set to a camera I’m interested in.
To undock a gadget simple click and drag it off the sidebar.
One major concern for me was how much data this gadget would download. For example if you had it running with the 6 higher resolution cameras, 1min updates 24×7 you would clock up close to 4.5GB of downloads! That would not be good. So the sidebar gadget has a neat event that fires when the gadget made visible or not. This was the perfect place to pause the gadget, if your not looking at it why download images?
Anyway this was my first crack at a gadget and the experience was enjoyable right up until I found someone else had also built one – doh! Regardless I recommend you have a go, if your in Queensland, Australia you can even win an XBOX360.