Nat Friedman of Novell has created the following roadmap for the Dashboard project, which if you’re a newcomer to the blog (more folks signing up every day, interestingly – can’t imagine why 😉 and unfamiliar with it is a desktop information-aware application that dynamically presents relevant information to you. Typing an IM to a contact, for example, and Dashboard might retrieve emails from that contact, as well as documents, pictures and anything else relating to him/her. You can see it here.
Though it gets suprisingly little attention, it’s a potential killer application in my view. The difficulty, as the roadmap outlines, is that it’s a complicated application with a lot of moving parts, meaning that a production release is hardly imminent. Still, the project’s shown enough that I’m going to try like hell to get to GUADEC this weekend to see it. If anyone wants to meet up there, drop me a line.
I had a Dashboard moment today when I was speaking to a reporter about a forthcoming product, and had to hunt through my rigid directory schema to find the accompanying material and notes on the release. Someday, I’m hoping Dashboard will do that for me.
