Weather dependent bitmaps

I'm new to zooper and have been customising a home screen for a couple of days. One thing I wanted to do was to display a different image for each weather condition (yahoo weather).

I figured out that I can do this by having multiple bitmaps overlaid on each other, one for each weather condition, with the alpha value set to 0 if the relevant weather condition isn't detected.

With not knowing too much about zooper just yet it struck me that this might be a bit of a heavy handed approach, with potentially up to 48 bitmaps in the widget (according to the yahoo weather condition codes XML I found) each with their own advanced parameters being monitored.

So I suppose my question is, am I going about this the right way and will it be a huge drain on resources?

After reading this thread it seems I was right to think it felt heavy handed.

From what I've read, the right way to go about this is to have one bitmap layer with advanced parameters that display each picture only if the specific weather conditions are true.

Example:

NB: The round brackets in the above code (b) (/b) should actually be square brackets but the forum turns this into bold.

jimlahey said:

You could create an iconset instead, or grab an iconset from here http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2084070 and replace the images with yours.

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Thanks for that, I'll look into it. Is there any advantage to going the icon route? And does it matter that my images are jpg photos (eg. a cloudy sky rather than a cloud clip art)?

jimlahey said:

An iconset is a lot easier to manage (use in different widgets, sharing etc) as it's just 1 zip file. And I believe jpg will work as long as you edit the image extensions in the iconset xml file.

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Thanks. Looks like I'll be creating my first icon set tonight then