I was playing around with Sitecore and I saw John West’s way of randomizing the desktop wallpaper. He uses a logging in pipeline processor that essentially updates the Wallpaper property of the user. It’s pretty cool….so I get to thinking…let me try to make it more dynamic.
I’ve always liked how the new HTC or Droid phones’ “desktop”. They show the nice nifty time/date plus the weather. It’s pretty cool to see something quick like that. In fact, there’s an HTC Home port to Windows on CodePlex that does just that. So, why not in Sitecore? Well, watch the video and tell me what you think? It’s not exactly like the Droid or HTC but you get the idea.
I basically updated the Shell application (Shell.xml) to include some nifty jQuery stuff. Sitecore does support jQuery (the noconflict version) and allows us to do some cool jQuery. In fact, you’ll see the library included with the install:
/sitecore/shell/controls/lib/jQuery/jquery.noconflict.js
Anyway, I created a UI widget library that essentially generate the time and weather on a layer on top of the desktop layer. This exercise had no C# code involved but I do want to warn you that this could bring Sitecore down. So just be careful.
I thought that this was pretty nifty and could open a new set of apps, interactions, and UI for Sitecore. If there’s enough interest, I might continue this line of widget apps and maybe make a library of it. What kind of things do you think would be useful to content editors, developers, etc? Or maybe a game like Minesweeper?
*EDIT October 28, 2010. We have moved our blog to http://blog.roundedcube.com and you can now comment on this specific post at http://www.roundedcube.com/WhatsNew/Blog/dynamic-sitecore-desktop
