The first embodiment of awareness software, enabling personal dashboard is Konfabulator (http://www.konfabulator.com) working on the Apple Mac.
With konfabulator, one is able to add small widgets on the Apple Mac desktop. A widget may be provide display and processing for
· Time & Date: a clock, a calendar…
· News Feed: aggregate RRS news feed…
· System Utilities: Disk space and computer monitoring…
· Sight & sound etc…
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This is a clock which is displayed directly onto the desktop |
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This is a shlashdot (an open source community web site) RSS news aggregator |
Those widgets have declarative XML based part and have a programmatic part based on JavaScript.
Apple Mac included an analog framework to its latest version OS 7.
Konfabulator is now a free Yahoo product which runs on Mac and PC.
Another company, Serence created a more extensive framework, named Klipfolio (http://www.serence.com/site.php ), including a more sophisticated GUI framework plus alarming function and also a cache mechanism. As with Konfabulator, the Klips (the widgets for Serence) are also defined with a XML header and some JavaScript part. Serence KlipFolio runs on Windows. Serence business model is to tune its tool to fortunes companies. GE is likely to use the Serence framework.
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This is Serence Klipfolio Dashboard. Each Klip emits a sound if the alarm condition is meet (may be just new data coming) and blink to attract attention. |
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On mouse over, the klip expands. Here one can see the content of an RSS feed |
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On mouse over an RSS item, one can watch the content.
Clicking enables to open the web browse to the news hyperlink |