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Modern-Day Pointcast Replacement?
toastyman asks: "Is anyone out there using anything similar to what Pointcast used to be? For those who don't remember, Pointcast was a screensaver/taskbar program from the late 90's that constantly displayed news, weather, stock quotes, and more. Pointcast is gone now, but one of my clients wants something similar to install on a few PCs/monitors in a waiting room and have them display the local weather, headlines, sports scores, whatever. Unless there's a pointcast-like screensaver out there that I'm missing, the closest thing I can think of would be some kind of RSS reader meant for full screen unattended operation. It has to be easily readable from a distance, automatically rotating what is displayed on the screen (think automated Powerpoint presentation) and automatically updating the content. Has anyone come across something that would work well for this? If not, does the idea of an 'informative' screensaver sound appealing?"
1) Find a web page or set of web pages that contain the desired information.
2) Set up a quick CGI to cycle through the pages and/or auto-refresh, using a hidden frame if needed.
3) Set the font on the browser to a large size for readability.
4) Set the browser to full screen.
5) Finally, lock the machine in a box.
That's it.
Solution to blink tags: wrap them in another blink tag, with a javascript delay loop, so they cancel each other out
All the waiting rooms I'm ever in have these things I understand to be called magazines. They're neat. Full of data; fast direct-access and they never seem to crash. Wave of the future, I tell ya.
For linux and whatever else it's ported to there's Karamba, which has components and forks created for RSS, weather feeds, stocks etc. There's a GNOME rival app too iirc.
I'm kinda surprised to see this story. I submitted this article about 4 months ago, and just assumed it got rejected....
:)
Anyway...
First page of google, 7 of those are programming examples or toolkits, not actual applications. The others are screensaves that simply scroll RSS text across like a banner. Not what I'm looking for.
Anyone who remembers pointcast knows that these are pretty different. Pointcast had weather maps, images, and looked more like a professionally made TV production instead of a window of scrolling text on the page.
That's what I'm after. I've seen a few businesses that have what look like commercially installed versions of these, but before I ended up writing it myself I wanted to see if there was anything similar already done.
I did google for this pretty extensively.
The saddest thing I ever saw was a computer lab of newbies surfing the web on semi-modern Macs.... using Pointcast as the browser!! That beast made Netscape 4 look like high class code.
It's been ages since I've used pointcast, so I don't even remember how one went about enabling it's browser (rather than just have it pass the URL off to Netscape or IE).
If you have Windows, this one costs almost nothing and does have the nice formatting, selectable background pictures, rss feeds, and weather: Online News Screensaver