Panic’s Status Board for iPad

I finally got some time to play with Panic’s new Status Board today and I have to say it’s pretty cool.

Status Board is an iPad app that helps you produce a visually pleasing status board to keep track of things in your life. There are built-in tools for email, twitter, weather and more. The real power though comes from the free-from widgets that let you build your own data sources.

In my own first draft status board I’m using one such custom source called MintStatusBoardHelper, which is a Mint Pepper that will produce Status Board friendly JSON to help visualize website stats, in my case per-week visit counts. (Note: there was a little bug in this particular per-week source but it was easy enough to fix in PHP. I sent a report to the author as well so hopefully it’ll be gone soon.)

I was particularly happy to see that Status Board only required iOS 5. For me (and I assume others) this means we finally have a good use for those iPad 1s that sadly can’t run iOS 6 and have been collecting dust.

To stand it up I purchased a portable fold-up iPad stand on Amazon for ~ $8. The stand works well though you’ll have to plug the iPad in on the top as there isn’t enough room on the bottom. If you keep the iPad plugged in (to a full power outlet) and set the auto lock to never, the iPad basically becomes an always on screen.

Some things I’d love to see in the future:

• More boards, swipe left and right to switch.
• Font size options. My poor eyes can’t read the tweets.
• Render single and sequences of photos. Think digital picture frame.

I was always jealous of Panic’s old HTML/TV-based status board and now I have my own. So happy! 🙂