Symbian in Motion

Custom Stock Quotes, Sports Scores and More - Scrolling on your Standby Screen!

by Zach at 1:08 pm | June 15th, 2007 | Category: Application Reviews, Links, Tips & Tricks

One of the many reasons that I am anxiously awaiting FP2 is for the RSS capabilities. Since I first heard that Motorola was working on SCREEN3 many years ago, I’ve been very excited about always- available content on my standby screen. Here in the US, SCREEN3 was somewhat of a bust though - in fact, (please correct me if I’m wrong) I don’t think any US devices support SCREEN3 even now. While we all wait to see what FP2 has in store for us, here’s a way for people like me to at least have something to tide us over in the mean time.

To start things off you’ll need a copy of MobliNews by Ian Ratcliffe. MobliNews is a very basic RSS reader with one main function - scroll headlines from one (and only one) RSS feed in a ticker-style bar that is in the foreground on all screens. Now because MobliNews doesn’t ‘really’ support any feed content other than the headlines, the key to making this app useful is finding feeds with useful content IN the headlines. So here are two examples of useful headline content:

Sports Scores

I don’t know about you, but it took me a very long time to find a good site that would deliver ONLY sports scores in the headlines. I did find one though and it’s actually set up very well. Totally Scored (sorry guys, US sports only) is a site that provides free RSS feeds containing sports scores in the headlines and nothing else. They provide feeds by sport or by team, which is great!

Custom Stock Feeds

Even harder than finding a good sports score feed, was finding a free custom stock quote feed. Finally after a great deal of searching I finally came across TC’s Blog where he details his Yahoo stock to RSS converter. TC’s AWESOME solution allows you to create your own URL that will automatically pull a feed containing current quote info on any stocks you desire. You can also add portfolio information to get a quick idea of how your investments are doing. I won’t go into how to create the URLs because TC does a great job of that of course. Above, you can see the basic feed I created to give me quotes for Nokia (NOK) and Apple (AAPL) stock. Here is the feed, if you want it. :)

In terms of my opinion of MobliNews, I think that it’s an ok app that needs A LOT of work. It does what it is intended to do I suppose, but the functionality is extremely limited, the organization is poor, and the options are lacking. Some features I’d like to see added:

  • Update and scroll more than one feed at a time
  • Browse through feeds in the app - not in the Options menu
  • Simplification and better organization of user-entered feeds (this is the most important part of a feed reader - no one uses the included feeds!)
  • Support for full-content feeds with a REAL viewer.
  • Hotkey shortcut to open the full-content of the current headline that is scrolling.
  • Ability to change the location and size (width) of the ticker. Currently you can only change the color, although that’s a nice feature to have.

So what good custom headline content do you guys know of/use?

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