Sponsored By
Efika 5200B Project
NEWT (News, Email and Web Ticker)in category Applications & Software
proposed by lucian on 7th March 2006 (accepted on 20th March 2006)
Project Summary
A lot of people spend their first half an hour at work browsing news and blogs, checking email, stock quotes and everything of interest to them on the Internet that might have changed since yesterday\'s evening. A significant part of them would be happy to do this at home during breakfast instead of watching the morning news on some TV channel. It\'s just that interacting with a computer while having breakfast or getting dressed is not fun even for geeks ;-). Enter NEWT (News, Email and Web Ticker) a small internet appliance based on EFIKA PowerPC system. It is always connected to the Internet and monitors all the news sources, email accounts, RSS feeds and everything else that can be retrieved from the Internet using a more or less standard API. It displays the news on your TV screen in a manner reminiscent of billboards or news tickers requiring minimal interaction with the user. You can switch to this channel on your TV and go about your business, just taking a look from time to time. News will be repeated so you can do the kind of diagonal reading you\'re doing anyway. If you want to stop on a news item and read it in depth you can interact with the system using an off-the-shelf remote control. You can even select a podcast news item and have NEWT play it for you.
Once you have NEWT connected to your TV and stereo you can always switch to that channel at any time of the day, even while watching TV (e.g. during commercials) to check the news, the weather, the email, the alerts from a daemon monitoring your library account for overdue items or anything available and changing on the Internet.
The key to the success of this application is the UI, and the key point there is to require minimal user input while presenting the user with all the news items he would normally use a web browser to access. The screen layout should be highly customizable, allowing some news sources to be defined as \"always on, never leaving the screen\" (by example number of new messages in some email account). The most likely candidate technology for implementing this kind of UI is a web browser. We should be able to leverage the embedded branches of the open source browsers (Minimo from Mozilla or Konq-embed form Konqueror). The configuration interface for the appliance will also be browser based.
The implementation will have the following milestones:
1. Configuring a small Linux to run on EFIKA
2. Getting a browser to run on EFIKA, first candidate is Konqueror embedded
3. Get an off-the-shelf IR receiver to work on EFIKA
4. Develop a framework for retrieving information through web APIs: the core components are an RSS reader and a small POP/IMAP client. The framework will have a plugin API in order to let anyone add his own data source (retrieved from the web or form the intranet
5. Develop the presentation layer, ideally using standard HTML and JavaScript, customize the browser to accept the input from the remote control
6. Develop the administration interface, use a very small web server (which might be useful instep 3 as well)
7. Add podcast playing feature
The main strength of the idea is keeping up with email and news without interacting with a computer. The future developement potential for this application is enormous, especially in adding intelligence in the presentation layer (learning the user\'s habits and keeping up with his/her fluctuating interests without manual configuration). Convergence towards a more intelligent media center replacement is also in sight.
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