Nat Friedman, co-founder of Ximian has been working on this idea of his, Dashboard, for a while. At first he was just talking about it, then did some coding in Python, then Miguel convinced him that Mono would be the perfect platform for Dashboard, and about 8 or 9 days ago some code landed in CVS and the world went crazy.
What started out at his pet project has grown. Now a number of developers hang out in #dashboard in GIMPnet and work on the project. What is Dashboard, you ask? Basically it’s an association engine. In practice the way it works is you change your context in some way, for example, someone sends you an instant message. When that window pops up the dashboard will change to display associated information such as links to recent conversations with that user, or that user’s name, phone number, email address, web page, etc. If the associations are properly made, then you could arrive at the same information by someone sending you a private chat on IRC or sending you an email. Check out this screenshot to get some idea of how it might look.
It should be noted that this software is in very early development. Right now the developers are focusing on getting the architecture and engine working really well. After that, they have big plans for the UI. It won’t be so clunky. Anyway, I’ll be keeping my eye on this.
Tags: Mono
July 15th, 2003 at 3:47 pm
I read an article last week about MS’s plans for Longhorn (not the Steakhouse, the operating system). One eventual goal for MS is to be able to do something like this: say someone calls you. Your computer will recognize who that person is, pull up contact info for them, and list recent email conversations. Gee, sound familiar?
I guess one difference is that Dashboard is here now.
July 15th, 2003 at 10:22 pm
Interesting. In a lot of ways Dashboard and things like it make sense, it’s just that no one has really come along and made it work until recently. It adds another level of integration to the desktop. I get an email from someone, suddenly their blog (RSS feed) shows up in dashboard, their other contact info, maybe a picture of them, etc.
I edit a file, exit out of the editor and the icon and filename show up in Dashboard. I can then drag that file and drop it onto an instant message conversation window to start a file transfer.
Another idea Adam had, for which I’m going to try to code a Dashboard backend, is to have the ability to add notes that are associated with “clues”. So someone sends you an email. That fires a cluepacket to the Dashboard which the backends can find mathces for, in this case the matches might be contact info, recent conversations, etc. for that person. Then you might want to make a note like “call Steve about getting Ben’s subscription to Out Magazine”. That note would be associated with you and next time your context popped up in Dashboard I’d see the note.
There’s all kinds of really neat ideas. The possibilities are practically endless. Someone right now is working on a Dashboard backend that will match clues to songs (based on titles and mp3 id3 tags) you have. Someone sends you a message on AIM or ICQ and asks, do you have any songs by Clarence Carter? The backend would find the “Strokin’” song on your drive. You could then click on it to queue it in your mp3 player.
So many uses….