[Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Hi!
I'd like to announce the release of Oculo, a homescreen widget capable of bringing any web content into your home. Not only full web pages: you are usually not interested in advertisment and menu bars, right? So, Oculo allows you to pick specific parts of the web page.
I wrote a blog post about it, with more details and an explanatory video on how to configure it.

http://www.mardy.it/archivos/imagines/oculo.png
In this screenshot, there's the Flickr! featured image, Google local news, and Yahoo finance.

Note: for some reasons, homescreen widgets written in Qt are not visible if you are running the community SSU; it's a known problem, and I'm trying to investigate it.

Oculo is currently in the extras-testing repository.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

i have installed the app but the content of the homescreen remain invisiable....the web content remain blank.... yes i have installed CSSU...is this the probs or something else....may be in next update it will be resolve

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Thanks for this. I have tried to achieve something like this for a long time. My approach has been with queen beecon windgets, but only with text. Full website rendering is superb. Sadly I am running also running CSSU, but I don't mind to wait, if you find the problem.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

This looks interesting and I'll try it as soon as the CSSU problem is solved.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

@Mardy,

Nice application it works just fine.

A couple of ideas

1. is there a way that the icon could be set as a small icon when inactive and once pressed the program becomes active and opens up to the users customised size?

2. also this would be great if it could be incorporated with Vlad Vasiliev and Tanya Makova's live wallpaper application. Football scores updated in the background of your main home screen and full screen would be great.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Changing graphicssystem to native should work for CSSU.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Oculo 0.8 is on its way to the extras-testing repository (it might be already there, by the time you read this), with the following changes:

• Interval between updates is now configurable
• Works with the Community SSU
• Bugfix: remember the selected area when reconfiguring

Please test, and remember to vote for its inclusions into extras, if it behaves well.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Sweet Widget! Great Idea!

Some ideas:

1) Is it possible to support websites that require login?
2) Possibility to change/disable update interval when tapping the widget
3) Would it be possible to allow scrolling within the widget?

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Great widget mardy. One thing I would say is that when you are trying to get a widget to the desired size, each time you go back into settings, I find that the sliders have reverted to default ( or sometimes somewhere completly different). Can you make the widget remember the last size it was set too - therefore making it easier to get to correct size. It's not a big problem, but would be nice. Thanks for your great work.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Thank you, Mardy, this is a very useful widget and is very easy to setup.

In the attached image you can see a problem: my text-based widget (taken from google results of "1 chf in eur") has black text on dark grey background and is hardly readable. The img widget instead (taken form foreca) is perfect.

Can I also suggest that image scaling is made with some other algorythm which preserves quality? You could use imagemagick as a dependency or use some other lib.
Thank you, again :)

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

great app (!!!) thank you. It would be really cool if you could interact with the page in the widget (scrolling, button clicking etc) but i guess this could get pretty hard :)

thanks again really nice work!!!



edit: also it would be great if links like this http://artoftrolling.memebase.com/?random which open a random page would work too.

i tried configuring with this link but it always took the first given page as the url. I even tried manually editing the oculo-desktop file but now it loads and just gives a blank widget

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Thanks Mardy. I saw something like this on a tech review on samsung galaxy tab 2 and I thought it just a matter of time till someone could make something like this on our beloved N900. And that someone is you. So a HUGE thanks.

Tried it right now and it seems its still not showing on my desktop. I have CSSU installed. I'll just wait for the update. Till then I'll post some feedbacks. Great job. More power. :)

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

I just receive the update. And it is now showing on my desktop. Great work. Will wait for some improvements like. enable scrolling and that would be perfect for me.Thanks Mardy.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Oculo is a great tool for simple image-based street traffic-maps. I haven't figured out yet how to directlink a Google Map view with traffic information, but fortunately there are legacy traffic map tools online that work just as well.

Many thanks for writing it mardy!

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

There is a strange issue:

screen1 is a snapshot of how the frame i've chosen looks like from the site.

screen2 is a snapshot of how it looks like on the desktop - you can see that there are black lines that replaces the white ones.

as a result it is difficult to see the values in it.

the URL i'm using is:
http://fibi.co.il/applications/ticker2/TickerMassad.asp

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

This might be a wild guess. But I think the website don't really has a background. It just show on the site that it has a white background but it really don't have one.

edit:

No. I don't think changing the wall paper will solve the problem

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Is it possible to remove the blue border around the widget?

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

but still - it should display on the desktop the same as it is shown in the configuration

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

I might be wrong, but I assume that in the configuration the whole page loads (including the white/non-existant background), while the widget just loads part of the page (without the background, and the default is probably black)?

Try loading the whole page on the widget (don't crop the part out), and see if there's a difference.

Good luck.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

that is very nice!
I also hope for scrolling inside the widget and some differnet way to resize the webside inside the widget.
some way to make a small widget, but keep text readable.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Great widget! Use it to display the active topics on this very talk.maemo.org :D

I came up with a few ideas but none too appealing for me except the maemo one ofcourse! What sites are you guys displaying via oculo? Share :)

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

I am displaying the Active Topics from this site, at least some of them, the main headlines from the mobile version of the NY Times. and free course lectures from Yale, http://oyc.yale.edu/courselist (highly recommended).

To tell the truth, though this is fabulous it takes up so much space I am not sure I'll find it useful for long, even though I have 9 views where I can use it.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

apps.I had the same idea as it seems perfect for TMO Active Topics, I also need to find other uses for it, a weather channel maybe useful if you don't like the present N900 apps?

Other than that news & sports headlines set up for websites on mobile phones, such as BBC's seem the other obvious ones.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Two feature request came to my mind:

1. "Render to background image" could render the webpage as an image. get the actual desktop number and set the background of that desktop to this image. Oculo widget could collapse to a square (maybe size little bigger than a program shortcut) for clicking to get the update dialog.

2. userstyle implementation like Stylish for Firefox, to render the pages with own custom CSS. Could make fonts better readable at small sizes.

thx for that great widget.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

I thought my idea was a good one.

Hey Gunni get your own ideas....:D:D:D:D

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Ups. Did not see the live wallpaper one ... But the custom css is my own :P

*Edit: And btw. .... my idea is _completely_ different from yours ... well kinda :D:p:D:p:D:p:D

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Ha Ha :D:D

I may post in the live wallpaper thread see if we can get any joy from there.;)

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

So far my most successful use-cases for Oculo are currency conversion and traffic map views, but I'm sure eventually more will come to mind. MRTG graphs or Debian Security Updates perhaps...

I keep running into a bug (PR1.3+CSSU) where I have to type in the desired URL for my widget quickly, or the config dialog will disappear on its own. Once past the URL input screen, the config dialogue stays put.

I often find myself wishing I could set a relative X and Y offset to begin the widget output at. In my traffic maps, I only care about the bottom portion of the image, so if the upper corner of the widget started at like 50px * 200px within the output element, I could trim out unneeded information.

Similarly, when using a Google Search to get updated currency rates, the HTML element containing the data has empty space off the right side. If I resize the widget frame, the text flows across two lines due to either a fixed element width or whitespace or something. Auto-clipping the whitespace out of the output image might fix this issue without the overflow problem.

Despite these wishlist items, :) Oculo is a great multi-use tool. I hope someday it appears in Desktop Linux distros also.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

I use it to show the top left corner of the facebook page, showing me if i have any new notifications or messages directly on the homescreen! I put the small window it makes over the stock facebook status widget and voila, combining them to a very nice widget! And beside the Oculo screen i put both kasvopus and sociality icons... =)

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

/little offtopic
I still lack skills to monitor particular widgets memory usage under hildon-home. Is there any layman guide on how to spot memory leak easily to one _particular_ widget. Why I´m asking it here? Because after using this my hildon-home memory usage in htop in virtual* column has went up to 183 MB and my device is slowing down. This has happened over 6 days of period so to me of course the "braindead" way of fixing this is to restart device or kill hildon-home and add widgets again. Well to be fair I do not learn anything from that and on the other hand I know that I could somehow spot issue and make bug report but currently I do not have _any_ idea what to do.

I have read bugzilla entries for hildon-home issues and Nokia engineers have given only some really vague hints on how to spot issues on dev tools (and sometimes it looks like they do not even test hints themselves that they give). And in the end stating basically that "If python is involved then uninstall it because it eats your memory" and some really hard to follow "Look at your dirty value! It´s xyz big and thats not good"...okey...riiiight. No guides or real life walk-troughs with given tools. *sigh*

Sorry for rant, but I really like this widget, but to me all the slow down problems what I have encountered with N900 relate to widgets and testers inability to spot these long term issues with them.

*Then again this is not bad in general but what happens is that it just keeps itself there. Different parts of memory themselves seem to be quite hard to understand and one thing what I have understood is that fragmentation of swap might be reason for all this. But this is just guessing and not scientific observation.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

How do you login to facebook in the widget? For me it just shows the login screen...

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

when i am roaming, and assuming i have set a schedule for refresh, will it still automatically reload the pages and i get hit with a roaming data charge?

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

same thing here. how did he do it?? because this uses webkit, separate from microb, facebook thinks this is a mobile browser (i can't use the set user agent control panel add-on to trick facebook). but the thing is - i get logged out once i have set up the widget. thereafter, all i see is a blank screen on the widget.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

also, would it be possible to set auto-update times based on time of day? for example, i set my widget to monitor nasdaq stock prices every 30 minutes. however, i don't want the widget to refresh when the US market is closed.

or, i would like the widget to update the weather forecast at exactly 8am everyday

also, perhaps updates can be configured with retries of up to xxxx times before it gives up and shows some text that the update was missed (like superimposed on the widget)?

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

lastly - when i am setting up the widget, there are two buttons at the bottom to resize text. i use them. when the widget setup is completed, i noticed the text size is reset back to default when the widget is displayed on my desktop. can the zoom level be remembered?

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

I opened the original facebook page in Opera (not the touch/mobile version), copy pasted it to Oculo and there i could log in and select the already logged in page as the widget!

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

still doesn't work for me.....oh well.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

how do u guys get the auto update to work? my 3g connection times out after a while of inactivity and oculo doesn't seem to reestablish it when it is time for an update.

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Hi,
having waited for this to come out of extras-testing, I've now installed it but the URL entry screen disappears after 2 seconds, which isn't enough time to enter the URL.

I'm running PR1.3, but not the CSSU. Is there a log file somewhere I can look at - it doesn't seem to like running from the terminal?

Re: [Announce] Oculo: web content to your home screen!
 

Finally jumped in and tried this widget, I'm loving it (using it to display public transport information). Love some of the suggestions so far, in particular the collapsible widget (though not sure how difficult it would be to implement, haven't seen any other widgets with this feature).

I have a suggestion myself; would it be possible to have configurable string inputs in to the URL that can be controlled via the widget customisation dialog? What I mean is, something like this:

The strings contents would be controllable from the widget setup, and possibly have multiple outputs each time you tapped the widget? This would allow multiple queries in a URL string with the one widget, without having to create separate widgets for each query.

Anyway, just a suggestion, love the app all the same.