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?"
Well you could always google (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Macromedia? (Score:1, Interesting)
At one Fortune 100 company I worked for, they had their own internal broadcasting (as in Television) group. With that came their own cable system (as in Cable TV). Each of the facilities at the different campus locations had their own "channel" which was really just Powerpoint running in a loop with timed slides, then the video out was being sent to a TV capture card, and then pi
Re:Well you could always google (Score:1)
Lets see (Score:2, Funny)
No.
Easier Solution (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Easier Solution (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Easier Solution (Score:1)
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.
Dead Trees (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dead Trees (Score:3, Insightful)
Waiting - and waiting areas - blow. Bring some headphones, a book, PDA or laptop. Take some control over how your time is going to be pissed away.
Re:Dead Trees (Score:1)
Re:Dead Trees (Score:4, Funny)
Just last week I was at the doctor, reading the magazines in her waiting room, and I read about the perfect answer to toastyman's problem. It's a brand new software called "Pointcast", and they say that it's going to be the next big thing.
Oh - Ok... nevermind....
Re:Dead Trees (Score:1, Insightful)
Were you thinking just Windows? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Were you thinking just Windows? (Score:2)
konfabulator (Score:2, Informative)
Re:konfabulator (Score:2)
Konfabulator is what we're using now, but it doesn't really meet his requirements. There's no cycling of what's displayed, we just tried to arrange everything we wanted on the screen. But, unless he buys some massive 40" display, there's no way you can read that unless you're sitting in front of it.
Gdesklets is close (Score:2)
For "screensaver" style stuff, I'm not sure. One could probably do some gdesklets hacking to get similar info.
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 considere
Pointcast to LaunchPad to Infogate to AOL to ... (Score:2)
That became Infogate and in 2003 after their stock went down to pennies was sold to that graveyard of many technologies (no, not CA, the other, AOL.)
Supposedly AOL was looking into either relaunching some sort of Pointcast-y service or integrating the technology into thei
Pointcast HTML engine (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
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
Samurize (Score:1)
linux (Score:2)
Wait, what am I saying... AOL's Instant Messenger gives me stocks, news, weather and all sorts of other crap without me even asking for it. Just fire up the program and you'll be bombarded. There's your answer!
Snap files (Score:1)
http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/misctools/fwn e ws.html
I remember attempting to get into these things a couple of years back. I installed a few news tickers on my 2nd computer at work in the hope that I would stay informed of news, weather, stock quotes, etc. throughtout the day.
However, I found that despite it being always there, I tended ot ignore it. To assimilate the information, I had to consciously watch it, which s
Corporate network killer (Score:2)
http://www.forbes.com/1999/11/08/feat.html [forbes.com]
I'm just as happy now using BlogExpress
http://usablelabs.com/productBlogExpress.html [usablelabs.com]
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 i
I miss PointCast for my grandfather (Score:2)
Having everything in one place is a great feature for those who appreciate some handholding as they use the Internet. It is also a great boon to those with slow/unreliable connections: you can just hit "Update", and it goes out and grabs all new content (auto-retrying as often as necessary). Then, you can read the content offline, taking a