# Travel Companion

If you've completed the Hello World and RSS Reader tutorials and feel that you understand them well but still want to learn more, then this tutorial is for you! The Travel Companion widget that we will create in this tutorial is something that would be very useful for anyone who travels a lot. It's a widget that offers many helpful features for travellers: a world clock that allows the user to simultaneously follow the time at home and at the destination, a 5-day weather forecast for the destination city and the current weather for both the home and destination cities, a currency converter, and a summary of the current news headlines.

But because this tutorial is about using the WRTKit for developing widget user interfaces we will not implement all the code that is required to actually carry out all the functionality that was described above. Instead we will have a Travel Companion "engine" that will provide all these services for us so that we can focus on the user interface. The engine that we will use (that has been created for this example) is a mock engine, meaning that it mimics what the real Travel Companion engine would do, but actually it just returns hard coded weather forecasts and exchange rates. That's all we need for this tutorial, but after you've created the widget you can modify the engine so that it actually fetches news headlines, currency exchange rates and weather forecasts from various data sources online. There are plenty of free services that you can integrate to. And here's the best part: because we will implement the user interface so that it's cleanly separated from the engine, you won't have to change a single line of the user interface code after you change the engine to use real world data!

Our widget will have no less than five views: one main view, three functional views and a settings view. The main view exists purely for navigational purposes. Because the widget is so complex we want to give the user an overview of what's available and an easy way of getting to everything. The three functional views include an information view that gives the user the most important information in a single glance, a currency converter view, and a five day weather forecast view. And finally the settings view lets the user configure the home and local cities, daylight saving time and temperature unit (Celsius or Fahrenheit) to use in the weather forecast.

The tutorial will teach several important things. First of all, we'll learn how to create widgets that have multiple views. Second, we'll learn how to separate the code in the widget so that the user interface doesn't need to know anything about how the business logic works, and vice versa. Third, we'll create a navigational view using the NavigationButton control. Fourth, we'll customize the look of the widget to include a logo for our application in the list view caption area. And finally, we'll learn how to update the content in the user interface using a timer. We'll use the timer to keep the world clock, weather forecast and news headlines up to date. This is very important because widgets are often used so that the user starts them and then just keeps them running for days on end. If we didn't refresh the user interface then the information would quickly get old and the user would be forced to do manual refreshes.

- Planning the widget
- Travel Companion user interface
- Functionality

Parent topic: WRTKit Tutorials