Tip: Create a marquee to scroll text

Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 12:33 PM

Posted by Glenn Rivkees, Gadget Developer

Sometimes you might have more text than your gadget can display. Making that text scroll in a marquee is a great alternative to increasing the gadget's area.

The first step is to initialize a label with the text to display. You may want to add some filler text at the end to visually indicate the end of the message.

marqueeLabel.innerText = 'DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN; Boyle Leads in City.    ';

Then set up a timer that calls a function to shift the text:

function shiftText(label) {
  label.innerText = label.innerText.substring(1) + label.innerText.charAt(0);
}

var marqueeint = view.setInterval(
    'shiftText(marqueeLabel);',
    200);

You can stop the marquee with this code:

view.clearInterval(marqueeint);

Have a tip you'd like to share? Send it to gd-developer AT google DOT com.