StatusBoard
Panic’s StatusBoard iPad app looks interesting. But, frankly, I’m surprised they even submitted it to the App Store. I thought widget apps were banned.
The default Status Board comes pre-populated by several meticulously crafted widgets, including Clock, Weather, Calendar, Mail, Twitter, and RSS. To edit the Status Board you simply tap the gear button. Then you can drag in, drag out, re-size, re-arrange, and re-configure all the widgets until the layout best suits your needs. Different display modes, which vary from widget to widget, include things like lists, tickers, and graphs.
The first feature that I’m really excited about is HockeyApp integration. One of the widgets available in Status Board is a custom graph. HockeyApp has made it incredibly simple to pass URLs from Hockey to Status Board which will feed your widget the data necessary to chart a graph of your crash numbers. You can fit up to 6 different graphs comfortably in Status Board’s landscape orientation, and up to 8 in portrait. I’m hopeful that daily crash numbers are just the beginning. The HockeyApp API offers a lot of useful data, and the data you can graph in Status Board is really only limited by what people decide to make scripts for.
Panic provides instructions, accessible within the app, on how to provide the appropriate data sources. And a relatively new company called StatHat, which aims to make gathering data simple, is offering up Status Board-ready feeds, too.
In addition to the six Instant panels, which are very easy to set up, Status Board comes with its own “expert mode” for Pro panels. Using CSV, JSON, or HTML files hosted on a public server, users can create custom graphs, charts, and DIY panels using personalized icons, colors, data types, and more. As long as you can write a custom, valid JSON file and host it on a server (Dropbox is okay, too), you can feed it to Status Board and turn it into a custom module for the app. Panic provides extensive documentation for the Pro panels, so make sure to check out the PDFs linked inside the app to see the possibilities opened by support for CSV, JSON, and HTML.
Update (2013-04-14): Cabel Sasser:
It’s only been about a day since we unleashed our Status Board app to the world, and we’ve been truly astonished by the amount of cool things people have built to make it even more useful and amazing. Here are some of the greatest things we’ve seen so far.
