Update: World Clock & Weather point release (with improvements and new features) is now available.
If you're a regular reader, you already know that I've been having fun familiarizing myself with the new "anniversary edition" of our World Clock & Weather Web Part in the blog this week. Yesterday, I started to detail the customization options available with the Web Part, which is available as a free download in our online store. I wrapped up that post by demonstrating the snazzy new, powered-by-Silverlight Show Clock feature, and today I'll get to the most fun new feature of them all: Special Effects!
Since we're taking each of the customization options in turn (from top to bottom in the pane), however, Special Effects will have to wait its turn. Thus, we'll begin today's show and tell with the Location Arrangements options:
In the Location Arrangements section, options in the Size dropdown are Small and Medium, Orientation options are Horizontal and Vertical, and for Alignment, your choices are Left, Center, and Right. As you can see, the default number of items to display per row is 3. The Maximum number of items to display per row is 10 (and the minimum is 1). Enable scroll is unchecked by default, but if you wish your Locations to scroll, simply check that box. The only change I'm going to make from the defaults for my display is to increase the Maximum number of items to display per row to 4, so that all of the choices I've made thus far will display neatly in a single row.
The next set of decisions for you to make regarding the look and feel of your World Clock & Weather Web Part is the Text Styles section. As you can see, you're offered customization options for the Text Styles for each of the three display categories (Location, Temperature, Date Time). Clicking the Font button (it's the red-underlined "A" icon) will bring up a Text Formatting Webpage Dialog popup, displaying your font options in a handy Word-like UI, with plentiful options from which to choose, e.g.:
Just for kicks, I'm going to make some wildly different text formatting choices in order to display more of the available options. Having done so, let's take a look at the results:
Obviously, that's not exactly a pretty mixture of fonts and properties, but I'm just trying to show off the range of choices here.
Now we come to the most fun new feature of the anniversary edition of the World Clock & Weather Web Part ... the Special Effects options:
As you can see, by default, Special Effects are turned off. If you want to dress up your Web Part page, however, you can use this feature to create anything from a light mist to a torrential downpour, and from a dusting of snow to blizzard-like conditions. This trick is accomplished by choosing Rain or Snow as your Effect (I'm going to choose snow), and then choosing the Density of the Effect. The default setting for Density is 50% but you can increase or decrease the percentage simply by sliding the scroll bar. I'm going to choose a Density of 83%.
You'll also note a couple of checkboxes available to you: Light Background and Snow Holiday Message. I'm going to employ the Snow Holiday Message, and write my custom message in the input field.
The final decision you need to make with your World Clock & Weather Web Part is the Language to be displayed. As you can see, the default Language is English, but the additional choices currently available in the dropdown include German, Spanish, and French. I've left my Language setting to the English default and, after clicking the Apply button, here's what my completed version of the World Clock & Weather Web Part looks like:
See the "snowflakes" speckling the clocks and holiday message in the image above? Pretty neat, huh? What's not represented by this still photo, however, is the coolest part of the effect (which would require video to really do it justice), which is the fact that the snowflakes are actually "falling" across not just the Web Part, but across my entire Web Part page. And, since our engineers can't help but go the extra mile, the snow actually "piles" up at the bottom of your Web Part page as time goes by. You've really got to see it to fully appreciate it though, so why not just download your free World Clock & Weather Web Part today, and let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!
Happy holidays from Bamboo and SharePoint Blank!
Posted
Dec 24 2008, 03:28 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.