"Mobilis Immobile" is a Virtual Earth slide show Gadget for Windows Vista. So with "Mobilis Immobile" ("Mobim" for short), you can travel all over the world to your favorite places without moving from the front of your screen! By the way, "travel without moving" is exactly what "Mobilis Immobile" sentence means in Latin.

Installing and using the Gadget

To install the Mobim Gadget just drag it from the gadget gallery on the sidebar or on the desktop.

Docked or undocked

Mobim can be displayed in three different views:

• Docked: The docked view is when the gadget is in the sidebar.
• Undocked: The undocked view is when the gadget is on the desktop. The view is larger than the docked view and allow you to view the full description of the current slide.
• Flyout: The flyout view combines docked and undocked. With this view you have both the docked and undocked view side by side. The flyout view appears when you click on the docked view.

Here is a screen capture of each view:

Docked view	Undocked view
Flyout view

Settings

Mobim gadget has an enhanced settings windows. See below:

Here is what each option means:

• URL: URL is the web address of the feed or collection currently displayed.
• Paste: The Paste button just pastes the content of the Windows clipboard in the URL field.
• Display during: Choose the elapsed time between each slide.
• Default view: Default map style (aerial, road, hybrid or bird's eye) used when no value is set in the slide description.
• Default zoom: Default zoom used when no value is set in the slide description.
• Shuffle: Shuffle slides when checked or displays in the order of the feed or collection when unchecked.
• Display marker: Display a pushpin for each item when checked.
• Display description: Displays title of each slide (or both title and description on larger view) when checked.

Choose your feed

Mobim gadget can display two types of slides:

• Live Collection: Live collections could be created using Microsoft's Live web site or could be chosen on Collections.live.com. To display a collection, either for personal collections of for shared collections, just paste the full address of the collection in the URL field of the settings window. URL address must be something like "http://maps.live.com/...&cid=..." or "http://local.live.com/...&cid=...".

• GeoRSS feed: GeoRSS is an extension of the standard XML RSS format. In fact, GeoRSS just adds two XML elements to a standard RSS item: <geo:lat> and <geo:long>. Of course, <geo:lat> is used for the latitudinal coordinate and <geo:long> is used for the longitudinal coordinate. See below an example of a GeoRSS feed. To use GeoRSS in Mobim, just paste the address or the web site where your GeoRSS feed is hosted. It could be a local or a distant web site, or it could be a link to a static XML or a dynamically generated XML.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
 <rss version="2.0" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"
 xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" xmlns:gml=
   "http://www.opengis.net/gml">
 <channel>
 <title>Perpignan</title> 
 <link /> 
 <description>Famous place in Perpignan, France</description> 
  <item>
  <title>Castillet</title> 
  <description>[mode@o][zoom@1][sceneid@10995771]Castillet Castle built 
    in 1368.</description> 
  <geo:lat>42.70069438573455</geo:lat> 
  <geo:long>2.893863466593684</geo:long> 
  </item>
  <item>
  <title>Dames de France</title> 
  <description>[mode@o][zoom@1][sceneid@10995756]</description> 
  <geo:lat>42.6985786771285</geo:lat> 
  <geo:long>2.888311216990704</geo:long> 
  </item>
 </channel>
 </rss>

Playing slide show

The slide show begins as soon as you drag Mobim on the sidebar/desktop or as soon as you exit from the settings windows, committing your choice.

A control bar allows you to control the slide show more precisely. The control bar appears automatically when you move the mouse cursor over the gadget. Using the pause button, you can suspend/resume the slide show; using the next or previous button you can move to the next or previous slide.

Note that the control bar is also usable in the flyout view. In this case, the control bar of the smaller view controls both the smaller and the larger views.

Customize view

Mobim allows you to customize the slide show using general settings or using a setting for each slide. To do that, you need to encode settings in the description field of your collection or your feed with a special pattern.

Three parameters could be used:

• [mode@X] : Set the view for this slide. Allowed values for X are: a for aerial, r for road, h for hybrid and o for bird's eye.
• [zoom@N] : Set the zoom level for this slide. Allowed values are 1 to 19.
• [sceneid@X] : Set the sceneID for the slide. This value is used internally by Virtual Earth to identify the photography of the scene. This value makes sense only in bird's eye view.

Note that parameter values do not appear in the description field in the detailed view.

Create your own slide show

Feel free to create your own Live collection or GeoRSS feed and view it with Mobim. A good start to find nice places all over the world is the Bird's Eye Tourist web site. Also do a follow up to the Virtual Earth blog Team where a lot of Virtual Earth tips and tricks are listed. Here some of my favorites collections (drag & drop URL in URL field and use recommended settings):

• Famous places all over the world (default URL in Mobim)
• NFL Stadiums (use Bird's eye view and zoom 1)
• Amusement Park in USA (use Bird's eye view and zoom 1)
• Las Vegas Tour (use Bird's eye view and zoom 1)
• New York City (use Aerial view and zoom 16)

Do not hesitate to contact me for bugs, questions, or comments.