I'm a laptop user and have a number of widgets that require internet connectivity such as weather, email checker, msn docklet, etc.
Would it be possible to identify these widgets as network connectivity required and hide them if there was no network connection? Maybe from a global settings perspective, you could identify which NIC to watch... or multiple NICs to watch and then select which widgets to "hide".
-davidliv
Well, I had the same problem and I want you to consider the following:
At home, you dock into your docking station and use DSL.
At work, you connect to the LAN of your employer, which requires an internet
password.
During a service run, you connect to a LAN but don't have internet access.
At the train or hotel, you use dial-up with your cell phone but don't want to waste bandwidth because its expensive.
Never expect a dumb computer to 'sense' your whereabouts, because even
if it can detect whether an internet connection exists, it can't guess if this will
suit you. (Windows will fail to detect until it has waited a minute in most cases )
Since you have to decide when you want your widgets to consume bandwidth,
you should have 1-2 shortcuts within reach, which enable/disable internet
dependant widgets. Search this forum for vbScript samples.
Originally posted by herd@Aug 27 2004, 09:18 PMNever expect a dumb computer to 'sense' your whereabouts, because even
if it can detect whether an internet connection exists, it can't guess if this will
suit you. (Windows will fail to detect until it has waited a minute in most cases )
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I agree with your comments and had continued thinking this issue through. The ultimate decision comes down to "Do I want to see the 'internet enabled' docklets".
So let me propose this. How about adding an optional checkbox to each docklet to identify it as "internet enabled". Then, have a global setting to show/hide the "internet enabled" docklets which would be available through right-clicking the AveDesk tray icon.
For now, I'll play around w/ the vbscripts you mentioned.
AveDesk rocks :rockband:
showing or hiding wouldn't aid you in that situation, since an internet enabled docklet would consume bandwidth even if it was hidden.
i think what would suit your needs better would be like a set of configuration profiles which would only load certain docklets. like a lite version, a no internet connection, a fully blown config, etc.
Its true that a hidden desklet still works.
Small update on this issue:
In an experimental pre 1.2 build (not yet merged with those from Andreas some of you beta testers may have) I managed to verify the following solution:
Each desklet has a scriptable property named Tag. This property persists to the Theme.ini and can be any one line text. I manually applied the Tag "NeedsInternet" in the config file to the weather and rs-feed desklets and wrote two scripts that would load a config 1. normally 2. load and delete all that have Desklet.Tag = "NeedsInternet". I attached them both into the new Extras menu so that you can switch these configs from the control panel menu. Of course, since Theme.ini is overwritten when AveDesk is exited, the scripts don't load the default Theme.ini.
May sound a bit confusing but works OK on my laptop.
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