DashBoard

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It's been a while since I wrote about what I'm doing, but nothing much has changed: I'm working with the iPhone SDK making different applications. Today I'd like to demo the application that made me start working with the iPhone: DashBoard. I first got interested with dashboards when I tried to make something userfriendly with Performance Point and found IMA's dashboard. Now I've created a simple, easily customizable dashboard for the iPhone. Because of Apple's NDA I cannot release it, but I believe I can show it to you, running on the simulator:

In this video you see a logo on top and nine KPI buttons below. Each KPI button has a logo, a number, a unit, a last-updated date and a colour to indicate if it's as it should be, falling below target or significantly below target (in other words, if there is a problem), using green, yellow and red. When you tap a KPI button, the report is displayed. The report is just a webpage, so I've linked up a webpage for every KPI button showing just a normal webpage, but more interestingly I think: PDF reports. As you can see, it works beautiful with 154 page reports, even though I guess for actually using this, you'd use a page or three with lots of graphs. :-)

PS, yes, my conservatory exam preparations are going well ;-)

Dashboard

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I haven't figured out what all the fuzz about Dahsboard is. I gave Konfabulator a shot once. Looks nice when you're using it, it's good for server monitoring etc. Sorry for the Konfabulator guy that Apple made a smiliar product. I hope he at least had a chance to strike a deal similar to what the guys who made Panther's filebrowser got. Anyways, Konfabulator had a problem, and Dashboard has the same. An Apple-blogger sais it right out:
Dashboard is (from a browser geek's perspective): HTML sidebar panels liberated from the browser window and placed anywhere on the screen
. Meaning, using it gives you nothing but clutter on your desktop. Big deal? Probably not, but you're not going to get good information here as you're training yourself to ignore it. Worse yet, when the Konfabulator widgets fail, they often more or less stall, making the ready-at-hand/present-at-hand discussion relevant again: it will jump up at you and annoy you when it fails. I don't care if it's failed when I'm not reading the information, and because I'll be trained to ignore it, it'll be nothing but a hassle. When I get 10.4, I'll be sure to turn it off straight away, just like I never wanted to use Konfabulator much.

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