# RSS Reader

The RSS Reader example is the first complete, working widget that actually does something useful that you will create using the WRTKit. It is quite a bit more complex than the Hello World example, but then again it also contains a lot more functionality.

For the Hello World widget we covered a lot of very fine details but for the RSS Reader it is assumed that the reader already knows the basics of how to create a widget, deploy it, test it, and so on. If you skipped the Hello World tutorial and feel that you're not comfortable with the basics of creating widgets yet then it's recommended that you go back and read the Hello World widget tutorial first and then come back and continue with the RSS Reader.

The RSS Reader that we're going to build in this tutorial will have two views: a main view that displays news items from an RSS feed and a settings view where the user can configure what news feed should be displayed in the main view and how often it should be updated from the Internet. We will let users choose from a list of feeds that we will pre-configure. In principle you can use whatever RSS feeds you want in your own widget but it's probably best to test first with the ones we have in our example since they have been tested and known to work.

The actual news feed items will be displayed as a list of foldable content panels on the main view. The panels allow the user to see the headline for each piece of news and clicking on the headline will expand the news item so that the actual story summary can be read. At the bottom of the summary we'll place a link to the full story in a similar fashion to many other RSS reader applications.

We will also implement a couple of features to make the widget more user friendly. For example the first time when the widget is started we'll go directly to the settings view to let the user configure the widget before the first use. We'll also show helpful information such as loading progress and any error messages in notification popup windows. And of course all configuration settings will be persistent so that the user doesn't have to re-configure the widget every time its started.

In order to make the widget similar to other S60 applications, we will tweak the softkeys and Options menu so that the settings view can be reached from the menu and so that the right softkey will let the user go back from the settings view to the main view. In the main view the right softkey will be used to exit the widget. We will also allow the user to manually force a refresh of the news items by adding a "Refresh" option to the options menu.

And last but not least, we'll implement the widget so that it will work in a standards-compliant PC web browser such as Firefox. This will allow you to test and debug the widget quickly as you develop it on your PC.

- First steps
- RSS Reader user interface
- Feed updates

Parent topic: WRTKit Tutorials