In the course of the day, there are 10,000 little things I need to monitor. Consider them “events.” A new e-mail comes in. A friend signs onto AIM. A friend IMs me. A new entry appears in \/var\/log\/messages on my server. A friend updates his Twitter feed. A new entry is posted to one of the RSS feeds I watch…<\/p>\n
What I want is a little console. It can be something like a command prompt that just sits there scrolling. But what I’d actually prefer is to devote the top ~15 pixels of my screen to a little bar. (Think of the Windows task bar, but smaller.) Whenever an “event” happened, it would scroll across. Small < and > arrows would be on the sides for scrolling. (Ideally, it wouldn’t be a “scrolling marquee” sort of thing, which may get very distracting. But new text would ‘pop in,’ maybe flashing a couple times. For bonus points, I could click on it and get a few more controls: when a new e-mail comes into one of my boxes, I could click a little icon to pop up the relevant mail client. When a friend signs onto AIM, I could have an option to start a chat. And super bonus points for a little “command line,” so I could click on it and type something like “twitter: Playing with this nice new application…” or whatnot. (Ooh, and you could have auto-completion. And support “google: ” or “calculator: ,” and various other little tools. Maybe even just a scrolling notepad, so I could do “note: ” for an impromptu log.)<\/p>\n
It’s a shame my programming skills are so web-centric, because it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to write this sort of thing in PHP. (Ironically, most of what it did would be net-centric, but it’d be a desktop application, primarily for Windows…)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the course of the day, there are 10,000 little things I need to monitor. Consider them “events.” A new e-mail comes in. A friend signs onto AIM. A friend IMs me. A new entry appears in \/var\/log\/messages on my … Continue reading