Re: Dashboard frontend status?

[Nat Friedman <nat novell com>]

On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 21:00 -0800, Alex Graveley wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone know anything of the current status regarding the various 
> dashboard frontend patches/plugins?  As in, do they still work at all?

Most have bitrotted, including Gaim and Evolution.  A few of them are
actually in vitro and probably still work, like the Abiword plugin.  

In the last few months I've several times started writing a simple
rules-based expert-system like Dashboard on a per-task basis, using your
focus-tracking code and some of those frontend patches.  No
cluechaining, no magic ranking, just simple rules like:
        
        When I'm reading email, show
        
                - other unread emails from the sender
                - recent emails sent to the sender
                - recent IM conversations with the sender
                - recent blog entries from the sender
                - highly-relevant recently viewed web pages related to
                the email body
                - highly-relevant recently viewed documents related to
                the email body
        
        When I'm browsing the web, show
        
                - highly-relevant recently viewed documents related to
                the page content
                .
                .
                .

Etc.

I don't know if you're interested in reviving Dashboard, but if I were
to do it now, that's how I'd start.

Nat