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Status Board

panic.com

179 pointsjpadilla_131 comments

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.

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.

Yes. There's a multi-billion-$ startup to be created that can deliver 'relevance' like that.

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

That sort of thing is available if you jailbreak.

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.

it has already been created and it's called google.

While it does look good, it's not the answer.

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.

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.

that is so true. when our body sensory tunes into our daily tasks and routines, it just knows.

It seems to be telling me it's 72F in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne at the moment.

I wish :'(

Either that or I'm assuming wrongly that because the demo is reading my location and localising the time, it would also be reading the weather.

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.

Looks like their implementation of this:

http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/

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.

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.

1: http://shopify.github.io/dashing/ 2: http://dashingdemo.herokuapp.com/sample

"Not only that but Emails Sent seems like a useless vanity metric."

We use it on our board to track the volume of support e-mails going out the door for each support agent. It's very useful!

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.

You're assuming it's a productivity measure and not a "sheesh, Bob looks like he could use a hand today" sort of thing.

> All in the screen space of an iPad

This is quite clearly meant to be used on a big screen via HDMI or Airplay.

If this is quite clear, why does the demo show an iPad?

I think the real concept is to use a dedicated iPad mini locked away as the driver for a display via HDMI.

> What's with the super-bright colors and super-bright whites on a super-black background?

It’s called visibility from afar. You are not supposed to read it like a book.

...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.

"Fanboys"? Can you save this for The Verge or similar please.

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.

Here are some existing examples: http://www.androidcentral.com/five-apps-android-daydream

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).

http://www.telemetryapp.com

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.

Oops, forgot to include the link to our OSX desktop app as per the parents request, you can get it at: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/telemetry/id571033468?mt=12

So the dashboard on the landing page is the real thing? Very cool, though no tiles except for Time seem to be updating.

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 like it a lot. I suspect you'll need to come up with a self-install version to get into larger accounts like ours, but it's very nice.

Thank you. We're considering a self installed version but it'd be a large enterprise type install and further in the future.

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?

You can see pricing here once you login: https://admin.telemetryapp.com/account/plan

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.

I worked on a project that does this.

http://atlasboard.bitbucket.org/

It's pretty simple to set up and write the widgets.

Dashing[1] from Shopify is pretty cool. Check out the demo[2] too.

1: http://shopify.github.io/dashing/ 2: http://dashingdemo.herokuapp.com/sample

Thanks

A real-word example from a project of mine: http://dash.furidamu.org:3030/dash (which hasn't really started yet, but the dash is up)

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.

I agree with this. Have VPN, will travel.

checkout infocaptor, it can be hosted within your intranet/firewall

I dont see the point of this app. Dashboards with far better API integrations:

http://ducksboard.com/

http://www.geckoboard.com/

http://www.telemetryapp.com/

http://shopify.github.io/dashing/

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.

You run dashing yourself.

It's not hard to run an internal web server for a small office. No sharing necessary.

Give https://www.leftronic.com a try.

I guess that was why they were playing with video out adapters and wrote about the shortcomings of the lightning adapter a while ago in their blog: https://www.panic.com/blog/2013/03/the-lightning-digital-av-... .

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.

Agreed, I don't know if I'd be able to sleep if my status was displayed on anything with less than a 20000:1 contrast ratio

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:

https://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/

It is amazing the polish that they put on tools for internal consumption.

You must pay extra for HDTV out? What?

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.

Do users also have to pay extra to get audio through the headphone jack?

One could argue that all features add value. Should all features then be à la carte via in-app purchases? That'd be absurd.

Things can be both absurd and simple. Really.

I guess they should offer a version with banner ads all over your dashboard.

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.

Why is it absurd?

It’s price differentiation. Pure and simple. I think that’s a very reasonable way to make money.

Very Dilbert.

This is great, but I have to sacrifice a perfectly good iPad to run on the TV out. This would be perfect if the Apple TV allowed apps.

If you look at it the other way around, early adopters who bought the iPad 1 finally may have a use for it (the app runs on iOS5).

It looks great, but its pretty cost-prohibitive.

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 cost prohibitive???

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

Do you eat at McDonalds every day? Most places aren't quite so cheap.

Ironically, my roommate actually regularly pays $8 + tip to get delivery McDonalds (via Postmates Get It Now).

I actually haven't eaten at McDonalds in awhile. Just love using the Chicken McNuggets pricing strategy. I could never spend that much for it though.

$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.

For me it is worth $10 just to see how they have implemented it.

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.

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 ;)

Yeah, god forbid you're out the price of lunch and aren't 100% happy with what you got.

Happens all the time when I eat at Taco Bell. Yet I keep going there...

Considering their first review, it seems it's closer to getting an indigestion than not fully enjoying the meal.

Agreed. I'm hesitant to buy any app from Coda for any price. Even free I'd take a second look.

And the reason is Code 2. For those of you who "had" Coda 2 you know exactly what I am talking about.

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."

QA must be quivering.

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

1. http://blog.librato.com/posts/2013/03/how-50-can-turn-your-t...

2. http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/

It reminds me of http://ducksboard.com/

Section 11.8 of Apple Store Review Guidelines

“Apps that use IAP to purchase access to built-in capabilities provided by iOS, such as the camera or the gyroscope, will be rejected”

How'd they get around this rule for the AirPlay unlock?

That may be the reason they brag about it dynamically reformatting the dashboard to work on a TV.

Oh, this looks wonderful. Impressive that there's already third parties catering to it: http://www.stathat.com/docs/statusboard

I find it quite funny that their FAQ says about showing the temperature in Celcius, but not "Is there an Android version coming?".

So... if you're an android developer, you know what product I want you to clone?

I think panic are very famous foir developing on the Apple platform. Them coding for Android would maybe even be a news item in itself.

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.

Funny because it's a trivial feature that's actually implemented, just obviously in a slightly confusing way that someone's asked about it.

They're famous amongst HN readers, but not amongst people who might land on their site googling for "status board tablet"

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.

Panic are an old school Apple developer, even before OS X. Even coded one of the first MP3 players on MacOS.

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).

It worked out my location (nice) but didn't bother changing dates and temperature to metric/local format so it immediately looked confusing.

Another take at dashboards is what we're taking with manager's team dashboards at Weekdone: http://blog.weekdone.com/be-a-better-manager-new-team-dashbo...

What we're trying to do is connect analytics dashboards to real actionable people behind some nice graphs.

This looks really interesting, especially the AppleTV support (a great device to use for digital signage/etc. applications)

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.".

it just streams to AppleTV with AirPlay.

Apple gives developers a way to stream unique content to AirPlay, separate from what's on the iPad screen.

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.

That's a narrow and one sided view of history.

I don't see much point in any further derailing of the discussion, but I don't think you picked a great topic for your humor.

I apologize if this offended you in any way, I think you get that I am mocking apple fanboys and their love for shiny things.

Disclaimer would be that I have a lot of apple gadgets and am happy owner of several Panic sw titles.

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.

Interesting... How did they manage to work around item 10.4 of Apple's guidelines?

From their twitter, "Our best guess: non-interactive. Read-only status. Not "widgets" per se."

Source: https://twitter.com/panic/status/321846592921534465

I have a hard time believing they built this before checking if it would make the app store. That's at least the vibe I get from this tweet.

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."

https://twitter.com/panic/status/321846667030695937

> 10.4 - Apps that create alternate desktop/home screen environments or simulate multi-app widget experiences will be rejected

Its not a multi-app interface: just a single one displaying multiple data items.

They are Panic.

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?

I believe you're looking for Hubble: https://github.com/jaymedavis/hubble

That's it, thanks.

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)

It's totally acceptable and very common: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit...

That's where the dev provides HTML, this is where the user provides HTML.

You could load any website using UIWebView, what's the difference if user provide the HTML?

Probably earned them a 17+ rating.

Obvious has a nice write-up of a similar tool they never shipped. [1]

[1]: https://medium.com/didnt-ship/3002a2aaac50

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.

Panic's previous foray into this space: http://panic.com/stattoo/

Not many panels. Payware that was abandoned in 2006.

Seeing shiny effect as used in this app makes me realise how much I appreciate the trend towards a much simpler, flat design in software.

Judging by the "Nowy Sacz" location, I am guessing it's a Polish application. Makes me pretty happy :D

They just use GeoIp to show your currently location there.. For example, they showed Penang for me :-)

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 think these apps should be called "Status Bored", because they are most useful when you 're bored.

Woah! It's Dashboard for iOS! ;)

This would be a great app if they released it for Android and Roku as well.

Would be a great native app for AppleTV. Hope Apple does that soon.

"clook"

tough crowd.

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