Ever since I signed up for broadband data on my mobile phone, I’ve been trying to make it easy for me to access information on the go. One of the things I’ve done is to write a simple widget to fetch little bits of information from different sources and mash it up into a tight little display area. For example, I have displays to show information from work, webcam feed from home, etc. One page that will probably find general interest to other people as well is the display of traffic information, weather forecast and CNA front page news. I’ve since cleaned it up and moved this to a public server so that it can be shared with everyone.
If you’ve got a mobile broadband plan on your phone, point your phone’s web browser to https://zitseng.com/widget. The page is plain and simple, so that it loads fast and minimizes unnecessary clutter and distraction on your phone. It is rendered in XHTML Mobile profile to maximize compatibility with most phone browsers (web browsers required though, not WAP-only browsers), and it will also display on all modern PC (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) browsers as well.
The data displayed is fetched from different sources on the web. Traffic data is from One Motoring, weather is the 12 hour forecast from NEA, and CNA news is from CNA of course. When you access the widget, the local server cache is checked for recent copies of data. If they are too old, new data is fetched from the origin site in real time. The timestamp of the data is displayed so you can see how fresh it is.
This is a web widget, which means there is nothing to install in your phone. It is just a webpage, and bookmarking it is all that is needed to “install”.
It’ll be cool if a web page can extract cell tower information like how the Google Maps mobile application does, in order to deliver location-aware information. I don’t know if this can be done through a web-based application?
I believe an external program is required to extract cell-tower info so as to feed to the web service as parameters. The typical browser on the device, be it Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian has no access to cell-tower programming interfaces or even GPS comm ports for that matter.