´óÏó´«Ã½ World News Widget
Post categories: Widget
| 17:31 UK time, Thursday, 2 November 2006
This is a Flash-based widget that shows the latest world headlines on a revolving 3D map. For each item in the XML feed, it shows the headline, the short summary and an indicator showing where in the world the item originated. Mouseover the map to pause and click to view that whole story. The headlines are refreshed every 15 minutes.
+ How it works
The Flash movie is built with two main subroutines - one that displays a 3D map of the world that turns automatically and can be triggered to move to a different location, and one that gathers the news feed (via a proxy php page to get around the Flash cross domain security issue), works out where each story belongs, and then triggers the map accordingly.
+ Improvements
At the moment it's pretty processor-intensive - doing all those 3D calculations takes its toll, but hey, it's just a prototype. If I had more time then I'd work on optimizing the routines to make it less demanding on the CPU. It would be nice to able to make the map far more detailed too.
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