Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
A PHP clone of Panic's status board (github.com/anchepiece)
128 points by adulau on April 18, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments


Hey folks, I am ajb, the creator of status panic. I had originally created it in a night and it hasn't been updated in a long time. The interest today surprises and shocks me! (Even though it's a fork which is linked..) I was never super happy with how the modules get loaded and the ability to provide dynamic data is, as several have pointed out, a bit lackluster. That said, I've got some ideas for improvement, and am open to pull requests - lets fix the flaws and make it usable! I would love nothing more then to get a screenshot of somebody using statuspanic in a real world environment.

Hacker News, you humble me.


The problem is that it's a really tailored solution for Panic's team and that's why it works - for them. Some careful considerations should be put forward to create a interchangeable system that any business could tailor to its needs (easily). A good start, although graphically speaking it's not sex on screen.


If you don't want to build your own there are also a couple SaaS solutions:

http://www.leftronic.com/ - A YC company that productizes the Panic concept. Very impressive list of investors.

http://www.geckoboard.com/ - Slick looking and comes with access to a bunch of core services.


Paul from Geckoboard here, always happy to help people set up their status board and discuss individual requirements. Feel free to drop me a line, email in profile.


I love Panic, and it heartens me to read things like this, from the bottom of the post that describes Panic's status board:

"And no, it didn’t slow down development on [insert the app you want the most here]. Check the board!"

Whenever Panic shows off something cool, they get a flurry of comments from people who want the next version of Transmit or Coda (that would be me) or, now that it's released, Prompt.

Panic's stuff is so good that their customers don't want them wasting their time doing anything but getting out the next version of [insert the app you want most here]. A lot of people don't realize, however, that you need to take time out to do these sorts of side projects if you hope to maintain your motivation and morale. Panic's work is a labor of love, not the result of a death march.


They're a great shop and I appreciate all they've produced. As much as everyone wants [insert the app you want the most here] updated ASAP, I've never heard anyone say "I wish you spent three months less on this so I could get it sooner" when that software was released.


I wouldn't say I e-mail them regularly (they may disagree) but when I run into a problem with Coda, usually related to abusing the tab bar by opening a score or so documents, occasionally design ideas pop in my head, and I send them off to them. I have faith that they're going to come up with something nifty and useful, so I just write and feel confident they'll use or discard my ideas as appropriate.

Which reminds me, there's a problem with blockediting that I ran across a week or so ago that I want to tell them about. To my mail client…


The canonical repo appears to be here:

https://github.com/ajb/statuspanic


Wow this is apt, I spent all last week looking at almost every public repo in github with the word dashboard and I was honestly surprised after almost a year that no one had made a decent open source clone of the beautiful panic status board


This is nice. Though the visual appearance is a bit clunky.


It's supposed to be clunky. It's meant to be displayed fullscreen on a high resolution display.


A screenshot & more info on what the Panic Status Board actually is at:

http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/


Obviously a good start -- but most modules are fed with static data. Including the project sizes, etc. Would be great if one could f.ex. just pull this from Jira/Greenhopper/whathaveyou


Good point, I was looking for such project especially to monitor existing projects via Atom or RSS by displaying a sparkline ( http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... ) per project where you can see the number of commits over the days.


You could provide dynamic data such as this but it would have to be on a per-module basis. Sounds like Atom/RSS would be a nice addition!


Few small layout issues: a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom moves along with the ticker. The ticket text itself is cut off horizontally in FF 3.6.16 on Mac.


He notes:

"This will currently work best on a WebKit browser such as Safari or Chrome. It will also work on Firefox, but I'm not testing it there very often, so it will always be a couple versions behind."


Any screenshots available?


There is an example installation here: http://allynbauer.com/software/statuspanic




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: