I'm always underwhelmed by these things because I think they are solving the opposite problem to the one that needs to be solved. The basic premise is that it's possible to pick a collection of important things and put them on one screen. And it's interesting from their example how poor that selection is: there's a huge amount of space wasted on time, there's a specious graph of inbox depth and a useless graph of sent emails.
I believe that rather than gathering information together in one place we are far better served by ambient information (a small example: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/03/ambient-bus-arrival-monitor-from... and my as yet unwritten up ambient weather display). Then information that's useful becomes part of the environment.
So, then I ask myself why this has been upvoted so much. And I think the answer is because it _looks good_. It's all shining and new-car-smell.
Those graphs don't really make much sense because such a dashboard is going to be context-sensitive. You would need to somehow customize it to give you the information that would be relevant to you, your team, or whomever.
I think my favorite example of "useful information now" is Google Now.
I love how when I search for a place on Google Maps, my phone or tablet assumes I want to go there soon and gives me a driving time estimate and an option to start navigation.
I also find it very useful when my web searches and linked accounts are taken in context: searching for a flight brings up the flight details on the day of the flight, and Google Now automatically pulls up my daily upcoming events so I don't forget.
And it's not only knowing what is relevant - I used to use some nokia phone and it would show my meetings on the sign in screen - so I know when I was going to get interrupted. With my iPhone, technically superior in every way, I have at least three clicks or swipes and I never know what my day is shaped like.
Luckily I use it as an excuse to get my head down and work.
But the point (another long one!?) is iPhones UI whilst much lauded, misses some useful functionality - and that will become more more painful as relevance becomes achievable
I don't think there is. The only reason Google is any good at is that they have been collecting data for well over a decade in order to do it. It's not just their web index, but they can see most peoples' email and calendar, their web searches, their location. Google also did things like "Google 411" which got them vast amounts of voice and behavioural data.
I'd be interested to see a startup go for the relevance idea, but I don't think they would have the data needed to do it.
On the ambient weather side - for years I commuted by bike, over country lanes or through London, and I simply knew the weather for the day (London is not quite as changeable as say SF).
Whilst these days I can barely tell you what season it is, I was more in tune with the weather then (not nature, too treehuggy)
I think my overly long point is to agree with you - I had no dashboard for weather info, but because it was part of my daily environment I knew what was normal and sensed changes.
Dashboards are exceptionally useful, you just probably haven't come across the need for one. They automate the task of needing to flip through webpages and jump through CLI commands to poll for the system status, whatever that system happens to be. You can argue that there shouldn't be a need to poll in the first place, but that's the nature of things - for one, looking at the raw data is interesting, and for two, the alerting logic may miss exceptions that are otherwise obvious from a quick glance.
Also because information is not valuable or actionable without context, and many of these dashboards do not exist in an environment where the data they collect can be delivered in a contextually appropriate setting. Maybe if the various modular components switched out for more relevant ones depending on what I wanted to or am doing, stuff like this would be more useful.
that being said, their description of its original incarnation (solving a data problem specific to their managing their office) was pretty cool. My guess is that, they figure there's some value in this so much as well put it on the app store and generate an extra bit of revenue.
Actually pretty unimpressed, and I usually like most things Panic makes. The UI seems like gloss for the sake of gloss, and it is very hard to parse too. What's with the super-bright colors and super-bright whites on a super-black background?
Not only that but Emails Sent seems like a useless vanity metric, so I'm surprised it made the demo screenshot. Is anyone really going around thinking that they need an emails sent dashboard?
And is it a personal status board or a team status board? Do I really need to see a MacRumors feed on team board? And a clock? All in the screen space of an iPad? Seems like they went with a "hey what can we put on this screen" design process instead of things a team _really_ needs.
Edit: I wasn't sold when Dashing[1] first launched, but the demo[2] that siong1987 posted seems pretty promising.
If you measure something, people will adapt their behavior to what you're measuring. If you measure productivity by volume of mails, people will try to increase the volume of mails at the expense of what is in those mails.
From that perspective, I think dashboards are useful as a sort of warning signal for things going wrong, but not as indicators of whether things are going right. So, the right way to approach it in my opinion is to measure whether mails are being sent at all, because that would indicate a major issue.
...or you could get an Android for much cheaper and install some home screen widgets.
Apple fanboys insist that Android features, such as widgets, are unnecessary. Then they go crazy over iPad dashboard apps that weakly simulate Android functionality.
How do you know that those who insist widgets are unnecessary are the same people who go crazy over iPad dashboard apps?
Really though: as an Android and iOS user, widgets are almost always sub-par compared to a regular app. I highly doubt that you could get as good an experience with widgets as you could with a dedicated app by Panic.
This sort of status board would actually fit Android's Daydream concept quite well. Daydreams are sort of screensaver-ish system that apps can use to draw stuff on the screen whenever a device is docked or charging.
Is there any app like this already out for desktop Macs? I have an old iMac that I would love to repurpose for a status board.
I was considering throwing together a one-off webpage with a bunch of favorite sites in frames that refresh, but that wouldn't be nearly as nice to look at as an app like this with prebuilt widgets that are designed to be laid out in a fullscreen grid.
I wanted to just use Dashboard, but it is really slow (widgets seem to freeze for minutes at a time, and Web Clips randomly fail to work for no apparent reason).
When I say I don't see the point, why would you limit the dashboard to an app? web browser based delivery is far better suited to this concept - The ability to display the boards on any size screen or hardware.
Some people are old fashioned and don't like sharing confidential business data with third party services. Other than that - sure, no point whatsoever.
That does look pretty and awesome for business data, but do you know of anything similar that is more plugged into personal and social data sources like the OP? I wouldn't be so eager to e.g. recode a weather API that pushes specifically to Telemetry's service when there are already zillions of weather widgets and APIs out there.
Telemetry is just in the process of getting going. The capabilities you talk about are coming within the next couple weeks to Telemetry (I'm one of the two lone programmers behind Telemetry). Right now the app is uber geeky but we've made a killer real time HTML5 and native visualization engine with real time push. We're working on making things less geeky as we go but we currently have a native OSX app. Our iPad/iPhone app is coming in a couple weeks.
I can't see any pricing - I'd like to use you guys for a project, but I don't want to invest time writing a bunch of custom software to send our metrics to you, if you're going to disappear in 12 months... What's the roadmap re pricing and sticking around?
We're going to put pricing on the public site too. We plan to stick around of course, the major advantage for us is that this project has almost no burn rate and is a critical component already of another one of our projects. So it's not going anywhere.
Yep, I need to make that demo board more dynamic. The technology is such that we can easily update once per second, perhaps even more frequently with some animation changes. Server sent events makes things easy.
I want something which lives "inside the firewall" vs SAAS, too, since a lot of the metrics I want to track are on servers which I wouldn't want to have touch the Internet bareback.
The biggest problem with this release is how few modules are available. I see no end to the native modules they could make as in app purchases –– and that's not necessarily a bad thing. OmniFocus, Charles Schwab... these are just a few of the modules I would want before buying this app. Until then, I'm holding out.
It is pretty, and probably looks great on Retina screens. I would be worried though (and would include a "light" theme) when displaying on TVs. Black levels on most low to midrange TVs are notoriously bad, and even worse in high light environments - like it would be if you placed this in your company's lobby.
Not to mention some serious issues for people with color vision impairment with those colors on the graphs. I hope those are just random examples but the defaults are better.
Panic has a history of doing "Status Boards" for their internal use. I assume that they did this project for their own needs as much as to create a new product.
Three years ago they described creating a status board using a large Samsung screen with an embedded copy of Windows XP running Chrome:
It's a feature that adds value. They are capturing that value via an in-app payment. If the value you would receive from this feature is less than the asking price, don't pay for it. Pretty simple, really.
You can probably use the iPad's builtin hdmi out feature for free, but it will output an iPad-shaped display. The one you pay for will dynamically resize to fit the screen it's attached to and display different stuff. Not a huge difference but it isn't like they did NOTHING for the feature.
After all the problems with Coda 2, I'm hesitant to fork out money up front for something from Panic that looks fancy, but I have no idea how reliably it performs.
$10 is quite a bit to pay before I know how "custom" my custom data input can be. Especially when there are quite a few open source similar-looking dashboards (like dashing: https://github.com/Shopify/dashing). Sure, not a full-blown app (but how hard is it to full-screen a browser from a set top box?)
I need to track a lot of metrics. Very few of them have been covered by Panic. I'm happy to pay a bit for good design, but I don't feel like forking over cash on the promise that it "might" cover my use case.
From experimenting with the app, it seems your custom input can be:
* RSS
* CSV
* JSON
* HTML <table> which the app formats to look nice
* Raw HTML which the app does zero formatting of, and they provide a PDF with the information necessary to make it look thematically appropriate (e.g. correct fonts, colors, etc).
The JSON/CSV can be displayed as a Graph, and CSV/HTML <table> can be displayed as a Table.
If you are looking for a dashboard just with your own data. Ducksboard has a free option for developers, i'm almost sure.
http://ducksboard.com/pricing/
If you later need integrate data from applications that ducksboard supports, surely it's "cheaper" pay for you ;)
I checked out the http://telemetryapp.com link above and it seems to require a lot of bitbending. I would be interested to see how you would compare something a little more geeky like Telemetry (which does have a nice polish to the UI) to Dashing.
In "how much I pay to eat out" money, no. (It is like...50 Chicken McNuggets tho)
In "how much apps typically cost" money, yeah.
It could be really useful, but in the end its still just a collection of stuff you can find somewhere else. You have to consciously open it every time you want to use it, as opposed to Mission Control in OS X where you can just swipe left and see your widgets. Not knocking the usability of it, just making an observation
Customer Reviews #1
"Buggy, crashing constantly after the first launch This may be an interesting app, but I can't tell because it cashes as soon as it launches. Not ready for prime time."
If you are after something similar to run on a TV without having to buy an TV + Apple TV + iOS Device - the guys over at Librato [1] have a post about how they turned a $50 Android mini PC into their office dashboard
Why is it funny that their FAQ has an answer for Celsius? It's pretty much only the US that uses Fahrenheit for temperatures, the rest of the modern world uses celsius to display temperature. That coupled with the fact that Panic are a renowned Apple-based developer, should indicate really that there's likely no chance of getting a Panic-developed Android version.
It's really not trivial to those of us outside the US (Fahrenheit is meaningless to me), and enough US developers are US-centric enough that it sadly doesn't go without saying that they would support Celsius.
Why would I choose to use this over a web based dashboard? A web service could be used from any device, code can be updated more rapidly, and I won't be locked into Apple's sandbox.
I really like the idea of this but I don't think it's quite right for me. It's incredibly handsome, and I have been looking for, essentially, a one stop shop 'this is what's happening and happened for X hours' to give me a high level overview. This looks close, but not quite there.
Tempted to buy it still, I might be able to tweak it to get it close. Panic software is rarely a disappointment (and Prompt is fantastic, with the few niggles I've had mostly disappearing).
Are they actually supporting AppleTV? I was not aware that AppleTV apps existed. There seems to be some speculation that they are coming this fall. Perhaps Panic knows something we don't?
Edit: The App Store only says "Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 5.0 or later.".
Ah, that sucks. I've used GoogleTV for this (with a web page, but no real attention to style; usually just a few numbers and lines, graphed), and while google eventually opened up googletv to developers (late enough that the platform seems to have died first), I guess Apple still hasn't. It is still a great box for a conference room projector (with AirPlay).
What is the best way to get nice, easy to configure status boards for cheap 42-65" LCD tvs then? Is there a web alternative which makes boards like this easy to configure? Dedicating an iPad for every TV is more expensive and just a huge management hassle.
You guys are like native americans with shiny baubles :)
I love Panic and I am sure this is excellent app, but... wait a week or two, there will be a sale or something for sure. BTW, I am not buying this, I would go with open source things someone posted in comments. Because it is free to use and flexible.
Why will there be a sale or something in the next week or two? This is Panic we're talking about, purveyor of high-quality apps that are priced to match. Not some $3 game that you're hoping to snag for $1 because you can't afford that $3 and a soda at the same time.
I'm not particularly offended. But basing your mockery in a crass stereotype isn't really necessary.
Basically, I'm assuming you are a decent person and hoping that you might think a little more about whether native Americans deserve to be stereotyped as foolish.
Right, if you follow the conversation, they also replied this afterwords, "But at WWDC they couldn't tell us either way! "Submit it and find out", was the advice. So we did."
A few months back on HN there was a similar project that ran wholly in bash, and displayed widgets based on push and pull HTTP. Does anybody remember the name of the submission?
Interesting that it has a panel where you can provide your HTML. I'd have thought that would be against Apple's rules (haven't looked into how restrictive the HTML renderer is)
Less bling and more function for us. We use Librato Metrics to report on anything that moves. It makes it very easy to pick our aberrations and monitor trends.
Oh. The rest of the data didn't really seem related to my location so I thought it was a screenshot. Especially since Nowy Sacz is more than 200km from me, normally my geoip shows Krakow, Nowy Sacz is much much further away.
I believe that rather than gathering information together in one place we are far better served by ambient information (a small example: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/03/ambient-bus-arrival-monitor-from... and my as yet unwritten up ambient weather display). Then information that's useful becomes part of the environment.
So, then I ask myself why this has been upvoted so much. And I think the answer is because it _looks good_. It's all shining and new-car-smell.