In Part 3 of the series, you’ll learn how to use My Mobile Site Widgets and get introduced to the Location and Facebook features of Mobile Web Server.

Over the course of Part 1 and Part 2, we’ve covered the basics of mobile web serving, set up the software on our devices and configured a few of the services to share with family and friends. Today we’re going to go a bit further, but in a different direction.

You see, from the outside looking in, it seems like a web server is used when you want to share certain things or information with others, but what about us? Is there anything that we can enjoy ourselves regardless of how our content gets consumed by the outside world? As you might have guessed, there is.

My Mobile Site Widgets

A good number of people that use mobile devices are also PC users. My Mobile Site Widgets takes advantage of this “coexistence” by exposing some of the functionality behind Mobile Web Server while using a PC.

So what are these widgets, really?

Marton Szomolanyi, one of the developers behind My Mobile Site Widgets, explains it this way:

My Mobile Site Widgets is an application building fully on top of Mobile Web Server technology. That’s why we call it an extension. This application is in practice a set of smaller applications running on the PC (Windows and Mac). They are desktop widgets run by Yahoo! Widgets engine and they show information about the phone and provide access to some mobile features like SMS sending on the PC desktop. On the mobile side Mobile Web Server serves the requests of the widgets using some tiny Python scripts.

Our goal was to nicely integrate the mobile phone into the user’s “desktop experience”…. Desktop widgets give a nice opportunity to show you relevant information in a polite way while you are using your PC and allow you to use the good UI capabilities of the PC (bigger keyboard and screen) for mobile related features.

What can I do with these widgets?

There’s a handful of features available via the widgets.

Battery widget: Mobile battery status indicator.

Signal widget: Signal strength indicator.

SMS widget: SMS widget allows you to read, answer and delete your messages from your desktop. The widget updates also the contact list regularly. If your eyes are tired, then try out the text to speech feature (works only for SMS messages in English).

Phone Picture Frame widget: See the Image Gallery of your device on your desktop and send images via MMS from the widget.

Call widget: Instruct your device to call a number by dragging & dropping any phone number on the Call widget. The contact book of the device is also uploaded to the widget, or you can type in any number you like. Note: during a call, the data connection between phone and PC is on hold, except in case of 3G connection.

Calendar widget: See your calendar entries in month or day view. Create new entries or modify/delete existing ones. See the Free/Busy information of other users.

This is pretty useful stuff, how do I get it?

Before you go on to install My Mobile Site widgets, you should make sure that your computer meets the minimum requirements.

You need:

• A computer running Windows XP SP2, 2000 SP4, Microsoft Windows Vista, or Mac OSX 10.3.9 and up
• An internet connection
• 512 MB of RAM

Installation

My Mobile Site widgets needs a couple of components. One component runs on your device and the other on your computer. We’ll discuss how to install each component separately.

On your device;

1. You must have the Mobile Web Server installed and configured as shown in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.
2. Install MyMobileSite_widgets.sis (.SIS, 34 KB) to the same location (Phone or Memory Card) as Mobile Web Server.
3. Ensure that you have started your server (Options | Start server) and log in with your mymobilesite.net user name and password.
4. We recommend setting the Access point to fixed value in the Mobile Web Server Settings.
5. To add access rights to your free/busy information from the widgets of other users, select Users, then add new user or activate the guest account. Guest account activation goes in the following way: click on the Guest Account in the user list and then click activate and set the username and password. To add a new user, select Users and click Options | Add new user. The battery, signal and free/busy information are visible to all widgets that log in with any of these usernames and passwords. (Other information is visible only with user accounts in the admin group.)

That takes care of the device, now we need to install the PC component. Follow the instructions that correspond to your platform - PC or Mac.

On your PC:

1. Download and install Yahoo! Widget Engine.
2. Run MyMobileSite_widgets_setup_1_1.exe (.EXE, 1.31 MB) to install the widgets
3. Select any .widget file From the Windows Start | All Programs | My Mobile Site widgets menu.

On your Mac:

1. Download and install Yahoo! Widget Engine.
2. Extract the widgets (.ZIP, 1,2 MB) to My Widgets folder or any folder you like. (If Consolidate Widgets is set in Yahoo! Widget Engine preferences, then the engine automatically moves the widget files to My Widgets folder during the first start.)
3. Double click any .widget file to start the application.

Now that I’ve downloaded the software, how do I set it up?

As in the download section, the instructions here vary depending on what kind of computer you have, PC or Mac. Before the current version of My Mobile Site widgets, all users PC and Mac had to do the following for each widget:

1. Type your Mobile Web Server account name and password into the Login window and click the Login button.
2. In My Mobile Site Phone Picture Frame widget, enter the Server address and account information in the preferences dialog.

With the current version, only Mac users have to do this. The Windows PC version has support for single sign-on; In other words, it is enough to start one widget and do the login process. All other widgets started after a successful login will use the same username and password.

Once you’ve entered your username and password, each widget starts uploading the information from the phone at startup. It is also possible to start the upload manually by selecting the “Refresh” command in the right-click menu.

Check one of the views from the calendar widget. This widget allows you to see the availability of some of your friends:

Try the other widgets and tell us what you think, which ones you find useful and maybe ways to make it better.

This concludes our Mobile Web Server series, but there’s so much more that we haven’t covered - like the new Location features and the sharing of live status in Facebook. To find out how to take advantage of all the cool features and keep up on the latest from the Mobile Web Server team, check out their blog. There’s even a contest for those of you interested in making your own widgets.

Enjoy!

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