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Modern-Day Pointcast Replacement?

Posted by Cliff on from the information-dissemination dept.

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?"

3 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Easy, kludgey solution by ShmuelP · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. Dead Trees by rf600r · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. Re:Well you could always google by toastyman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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. :)