Big Board is an experimental new sidebar for the OnlineDesktop. Currently designed only for the Linux Client, big board is not a new panel, it's designed to be a quick overview of your desktop allowing you to interact with whatever you see in it.
NOTE:
Big Board is not a stand alone application, it is intended to be run as a piece of the entire desktop. Do not try to just run Big Board from the command line. Instead please grab the entire OnlineDesktop bundle and log into the Online Desktop session from your GDM login screen.
Stocks
Big Board can hold a number of different sections or "stocks" as we call them. Currently there is no interactive way to change the stocks that Big Board displays, however a clever individual could edit their gconf keys to control which stocks display.
The here is the breakdown of the default stock setup.
Self
The self stock is intended to provide a sense of identification and personalization to the desktop. It displays the name and chosen photo of the person who is currently logged in. It acts as one of the only identifying or personal pieces of the current desktop display.
Currently this kind of information is edited through the GNOME About Me dialog, however since that information remains quite hidden even after being entered there exists no real incentive for people to change from the defaults that are created. And unless all applications look to this name / photo from the About Me dialog it becomes an extra task to perform that has little value for the user.
Search
Search uses the deskbar search entry and is intended to be a quick launch system first, and then a quick search over elements present in the big board such as people, applications, and calendar events.
[... to be continued]
Comments
AndersFeder: Probably not the first time someone thinks this, but perhaps some of the ideas from the now defunct Dashboard project could be integrated into Big Board?
NathanHawks: Fedora 9 has Online Desktop in a repository. Is there a way to add it to existing Gnome2 settings, instead of running a session demo? I don't want to lose my heavily-customized toolbars. Great work so far!