So What Have I MacGyvered Up?

After Stilly pointed me towards this article on Life Hacking, I decided to do my own radar screen. The basic idea is to try and present to the user as much information about their current world as possible in a glance. It also needed to be something they could ignore if they were concentrating on other things.

This window sits in the top left hand corner of the user's screen. It's transparent so they can see whatever's behind it (in this case, TRIM), but it's always visible. There are a series of "planets" that rotate around the centre, and each planet can have a number of "moons". Each planet represents some aspect of the users world, and each moon indicates the number of things associated with that planet. So number of records in your TRIM in-tray, number of unread emails, whatever.

In it's current state, the program interfaces with TRIM and Outlook. So in this screen grab I can tell at a glance that I have 3 unread emails and 1 record currently assigned to me. Although it isn't shown, if I've got a meeting coming up, another planet would appear, orbiting closer and closer to the centre until it's time for me to stop working. I mean go to the meeting.