« Chuck "The Hitman" Hiter | Main | Release: Hovervue 0.0.2 »
August 13, 2005
Hovervue
Hovervue is a .NET application (that requires the Whidbey Beta 2 .NET Framework) that places a bar, similar to the Windows' start bar, at the top of your desktop. It's meant to make it easy for you to have instant information at all times without taking up too much desktop real estate. Another goal was to make it as easy and quick as possible to get more information instantly and make it go away just as fast. This is accomplished by hovering over whatever tile you're looking for more data on.
Installation is as easy as downloading the ZIP file, expanding it on your machine, and launching the hovervue.exe file. If your system has Whidbey Beta 2 of the .NET Framework already installed, you'll see the empty Hovervue bar show up within seconds. You could then right-click it and select "Add Tiles..." to bring up a dialog that allows you to add tiles to the Hovervue bar. Once you've done that, Hovervue will save your settings when you shut it down and load them again the next time you start it up. Placing a shortcut to Hovervue in your Startup folder is a good way to make sure it's always running.
It's also meant to be fully extensible by allowing anyone to create custom-made tiles. For now, I've created six so people can experiment with Hovervue in general. I plan on making several more tiles myself but I also will at some point release the source to many of the tiles so others can use them as a reference for how to create their own tiles as well as some simple documentation and package it all up as the Hovervue SDK. This release comes with the following tiles: HvDate (Shows today's date and a calendar when you hover over it), HvTime, HvStockQuote, HvSeattleTraffic (shows the traffic maps when hovered over), HvUpTime (how long has your computer been running since it was last rebooted), and HvWeather (provide a zip code and get local weather data). You can run more than one of the same tiles if needed (e.g. two StockQuote tiles to get quotes for two different companies, etc.).
This version is far from perfect as I have plenty of work to still do on it but it is stable as I--and a few guys at work--have been running it for some time now. Please send me any bugs (gusper [at] gmail dot com) or feature requests you may have as I'm in the process of compiling a list of todo items for this app so I can continue to enhance it as I get time. I'm looking forward to any ideas/feedback anyone who tries it out may have and I hope some of you find it useful.
Download: Hovervue (Ridiculously Beta)
Posted by gus at August 13, 2005 10:48 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.gusperez.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/70
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Hovervue:
» Introducing Hovervue... from aWorkBlogByGus
Got a chance to code some today and I finally got around to getting Hovervue all packaged up and usable... [Read More]
Tracked on August 13, 2005 11:39 PM