Many of you out there count on your Merlin Mann’s or your David Sparks’ to get your productivity tips. However, when Warren Ellis mentions an App, you can bet that it’s made a big splash. If you managed to miss the coverage, Status Board is a Dashboard-like app for the iPad. That may be a gross oversimplification, but it is a good place to start.
For most of the linked panels below go to the site on your iPad and you can install them into Status Board with a click. If that isn’t the case they will have more detailed instructions for you to follow.
Table of Contents
Power Users
You may not code, but you have enough knowledge to know that the Sysadmin and Developers usually know a good productivity app when they see it. Status Board loses some customizability for you, but it still can be quite useful. You can configure the app to show off your unread count by email box, though this is restricted to IMAP accounts. They have a built in Twitter viewer as well, that includes multiple account support. A calendar viewer is also built-in that grabs your info from the iOS calendars. Use the built in RSS panels to keep an eye on your favorite sites. If you use Things you can hack together a panel that keeps track of your current todo list, it does require a bit of coding. Omnifocus tasks can be added as well, which requires a bit of Python, and your local Mac’s apache server.
Media Hounds
LIke Dashboard, you can use Status Board just to keep some stuff that looks pretty. You can keep an eye on Dribble. If you’re using Instagram you can see a slideshow of the 20 most recent photos in your feed. Last FM users can see a scrolling list of their most recently played tracks, including the album art. The podcast network TWiT has released a panel that shows you the now playing on the live stream, and you can actually start and stop the stream without leaving the app. Sports fans can find a variety of stat apps, including a panel that keeps track of the NBA playoffs. For more just informational display, a variety of transit services have been given their own panels. Space Nerds can get a very beautiful Moon calendar that just shows what the current phase of the moon is.
Sysadmins
So that term is going to cover more than just you server managers out there, as there are some tools for other IT users. For what is probably the most rudimentary function in Status Board, you can get an indicator of your Pingdom status for your site. You can create a panel that keeps track of your server’s statistics based on your custom scripts as well, which of course is going to require a bit of coding on both ends to achieve. If you’re a network tech, you can use the Mac App IP Scanner and Dropbox to keep a list of running devices on your LAN. There are tons of different panels designed around getting Google Analytics, in both graph form, and your top pages. If you use Vigil to monitor your site, they’ve created a panel as well. Marco Arment has a github entry to get your Libsyn podcast download numbers.
Developers
Considering Panic’s suite of apps, it shouldn’t be surprising that many of the most powerful tools developed for Status Board are developer tools. If you’re a blank slate type of creator, the custom panel is built right in and there is a PDF available for creating your HTML page to fill it. (You will need to host those pages on a web server.) You can also create custom graphs from CSV’s saved to your Dropbox account. You can track your app crashes with a panel from Hockey. You can see your current sales using Appfigures. If you’re trying to time a realse or update for the App Store you can see the There’s a panel that shows your bugs tracked via GitHub.
Status Board shows that developers are like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, they will find a way despite limitations. It’s already created a firestorm of new development. We used a few sources for this post, the one off posts that we linked to, as well as Panic’s Blog, and the excellent Tumblr: Status Board Widgets. We’ve shown you just a few possible configurations of, we’d love to see yours. Share them in the comments below.
Photo Credit: Michelle McConnell
