Modern-Day Pointcast Replacement? 35
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?"
Easier Solution (Score:3, Informative)
Easy, kludgey solution (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Were you thinking just Windows? (Score:4, Informative)
konfabulator (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well you could always google (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I used to publish content for PC... (Score:2, Informative)
I agree, I *really* miss PointCast. I can't believe that someone didn't buy the tech or IP and implement it somewhere else. Shame.
You think it could be considered 'abandonware' yet?
Online News Screensaver (Score:3, Informative)
ModeElevent (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.modeeleven.com/cgi-bin/doc?sec=Produ
And a review: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1401393,00.a
Newsmap (Score:3, Informative)
MythTV/MythWeather (Score:2, Informative)
A few people have mentioned using, say, gDesklets and placing a number around the screen. Could you perhaps put one large one on each of a number of workspaces then work out some simple little program that would tell the window manager to flick workspaces every 5 minutes or something?
(For the record I don't remember if "Workspace" is the correct word these days. Virtual Desktop would be another word...)