Amahi portal

[gmw]

Looks like a good start .. but we need shading to go from dark to light (rather than light to dark) given the current home page layout.
If you send the source asset to support at amahi.org we'll work with it!

As far as the dashboard goes -- for "glitz" we could even have a flash variant to make it really sexy ... eg. http://www.desktoptwo.com/
What do you think?

[cpg]

Looks like a good start .. but we need shading to go from dark to light (rather than light to dark) given the current home page layout.

note that i believe this was for the dashboard, not the home page. with a darker theme it would go very nicely.

As far as the dashboard goes -- for "glitz" we could even have a flash variant to make it really sexy ... eg. http://www.desktoptwo.com/
What do you think?

that looks sexy. maybe it's just me, but ... i have trouble chasing the menu options.

(it could be me; i notice i have trouble pinning down anything sexy )

[moredruid]

that sexy glitzy stuff will look great at first, but IMHO will get very annoying after a while. There's something to be said for static buttons/menu's... I for one would vandalize the person who'd create such an interface in a car/ATM or whatever

I'd rather have something steady looking really polished (shading, AJAX draggable objects so you can set it up the way you want) than something flashy. Flash also introduces another issue: accessibility/useability is impossible to maintain. With "iconized objects" you can have metadata with titles etc.

For the Portal (amahi.org) we just need some easier pics and maybe a logo (we're workin' on that).

For the Dashboard I'd say: make the current http://hda homepage look a little like what I've drawn with the icons on the left hand side of the page and in the right hand side (currently serving the latest news) have some collapsing boxes/menu's with for instance the disk monitoring (disk usage graphs/temp below graphs), latest news, latest actions on the hda (added a user/share/app, indexed # pictures, files, music); something like that. That gives you a lot of info at a glance.

Cuz let's be honest: geeks (like me) drool over functions, but Joe Sixpack only cares _that_ it works (and it should be very easy too!), not how.

Look at the Windows Home Server page. Just look at the 4 pictures at the top of the page. The audience we're trying to attract (maybe not yet, but in the long run) will look at that and say: I want that for my home. Windows is entrenched, so Amahi has to be better (it is), more polished (it isn't), and easier (or at least just as easy - in most peoples' eyes it isn't).

[cpg]

Hmpf,

I've made something as a little setup of how I would like the dashboard to look (and it could also be used as the page image to give users a preview of the product)



feedback please

niiiice!

a suggested idea as for how to show/manage many apps, from Ryu: http://omega.aniwood.org/


i should point out that the code as it is now is very simple. there are three parts: the main page, the rendering of each app and the more important, the css in style.css for the theme currently active.

the .html.erb are html files with Embedded RuBy as a template. the @app variable contains a list of applications that have "show in dashboard" enabled.

if this list is less than 3, we show an image linking to the apps table.

very simple.

[OT: unless something bad happens in the next few seconds, this will be my *third* attempt to post this ... somehow i closed the tab twice. ... then later found out that in firefox you can undo close tab with a right click in the tab area]