Comments on: Status icon for your office

By: Angie

Angie — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:54:29 +0000

The whole idea is to use MSN IM icons…. cute and clever. If someone at MS doesn’t get it, they prolly should find another job. HAhahaha!

By: Wwhat

Wwhat — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:52:02 +0000

He says on the flickr page about the icons:
“Thanks for the comments. It’s a proof of concept; Rev 2 will be better. I used OLED because I think OLED is beautiful. The icons were quick ones that looked good on the display and matched the corporate IM software where I work. “

By: Wwhat

Wwhat — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:50:31 +0000

@fartface
You make it sound like wifi photoframes are dirtcheap, that’s not how I experience them to be.

By: Wwhat

Wwhat — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:47:56 +0000

@Boter2099
It’s all cute and well to set screensaver text but this is the 2000′s and we by now all know enough to not use screensavers but have the monitor go on standby instead and so use upto hundreds of Watt less.
Screensavers are so 80′s.

By: fartface

fartface — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:33:51 +0000

A wifi photo frame can do the same for far less money and far far easier.

Old hat. been there done that 2 years ago.

By: Saf

Saf — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:57:36 +0000

Why not go with something simple light red, amber and green? Red when he is out of the office, amber whne he is present but busy and green when he is free?

Could also implement some custom images for the project with maybe animated varients? A red animated varient depicting he is at lunch, with what else, a cartoon type guy eating something lol, a red dude driveing a car towards a driveway to indicate he has gone home etc.

Pretty fun idea, one I would look into if I gave a damn about people bothering me all the time hehe.

By: neil

neil — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:23:17 +0000

PSP would work… with the windows screen extender.. then you could write a program to display what ever, and as long as your computer was running you could text through the web to your prog..

By: Etan

Etan — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:10:13 +0000

rather than an OLED, a moat and drawbridge. that should make my status pretty clear.

By: Life2Death

Life2Death — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:59:09 +0000

No build information? what a farse. I’d rather not know about something that gives me no information on what they did, hoping to learn from it and recreate part of it to learn things for myself. Bleh.

By: dan

dan — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:21:14 +0000

andrew, the staff offices at my secondary school which was built in the 60s had red or green lights to indicate whether anyone was in. it’s not a new idea :)

but this implementation is great; the OLED looks really smart. if I were doing it, though, I’d think about using some text – maybe alternate between the ‘away’ logo and some text saying ‘back in x minutes’, or even a snapshot of my teaching timetable (i work at a uni). and you should be able to send a text message to the system containing updated information, so if you get stuck in a traffic jam/meeting/long conversation you can give a new arrival time.

actually, i want one of these…

By: charlie

charlie — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 07:07:20 +0000

meh… but those 4d oleds are pretty cool. expensive, but nobody else supplies these to the hobby scene. the visual on these things can be really great. it changes a lot of things from the lcd paradigm. when these take over in consumer devices, you will see an obvious change in interface design. it will come. you will see.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:54:18 +0000

Hmm. I did this nearly 20 years ago. I used a red and green LED wired in reverse parallel attached to a line on a serial port. I took advantage of the fact that the serial port line would swing from a positive voltage to a negative voltage, thus would light only one of the LEDs. The LEDs were outside my door. The serial port was on my PC. A small program on my PC changed the state of the serial line and had an on-screen mimic display.

Kids today with their fancy-shmancy OLEDs. Pah!

By: FreXxX

FreXxX — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:36:25 +0000

Well. Which icons i would use, depends on the Size of the Screen. For a little screen, and a high viewing range i just would use colors. Red, if im not there, yellow, when im taking a break, green, if im there.

By: epicelite

epicelite — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:52:52 +0000

The icons are from MSN.

By: pokey

pokey — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:56:55 +0000

I’d use one of those LCD picture frames that’ll take [sprite_tm]‘s hacked firmware. Those 4D Systems jobs are about as expensive as a refurb 19″ LCD.