I'd like to tell you a story. like most kids, I drew a lot when I was younger. however, instead of my drawings being varied, I found myself coming back to the perfection of a few select things. the most persistent of these memories is that of a winter holiday party at my aunt / uncle's flat in chicago, dressed in my 'sunday' best, resigned with the party's other children to one of the back rooms: drawing alarm clocks, the lighting of emergency vehicles, and other such authoritative notification / control surfaces. I never understood what they would mean, but the idea of having such information and control at my fingertips always deeply fascinated me. the control surfaces of the spaceships / underwater vessels I made out of closets and cardboard boxes also captivated me endlessly, if only to the chagrin of the friends I made said crafts with; who wanted instead to explore the depths of the outer rooms of the house, not fiddle about with the damned controls.
fast forward some 20 years or so to last sunday, when a curious study during a brief pause in LICK 's development turned into a several day long fascination. I recently upgraded to a new iphone 6s plus (holy shit it's HUGE), leaving the ipad I bought myself for my birthday over the summer in something of a precarious state of disuse. it originally served as a secondary screen to my laptop , but now I have four screens attached to my work computer. so what of the ipad now? I distinctly remember the head designer at HLB using his ipad as an ipod, but that seemed a bit overkill; and my laptop serves as something of a jukebox as well as a development server. there are also several products on the market that turn one's ipad into something of a dashboard / HUD, but nothing that seemed worthy of the monetary investment; saying nothing of the eventual uselessness of said products: delivering lots of data, but no actual information.*
but I simply couldn't bear the thought of my lovely retina ipad relegated to the modest service of an occasional bedtime e-reader. after a bit of tinkering, I realized I could remotely tell a pinned tab in my browser window of my work computer to open up another tab of my liking – the links I go to most commonly, for example – and a bit more tinkering revealed that I could also remotely tell the instance of itunes running on my laptop to play and pause, as well as remotely operate the laptop's system volume.
what else could go on the HUD of a designer / developer? this would be running in full screen mode of course, so the time and a quick calendar would be nice; I could use TRA.JECT 's weather module to grab a more beautiful forecast than apple's dashboard widget can offer; commonly forgotten sublime text shortcuts would also be nice to have at my fingertips; as well as some at-a-glance statistics of my remote production server; a cursory glance at the news would also keep me abreast of the world quickly boiling over; and maybe a couple words of inspirational as well?
and thus, SUNGAZER was born. I started tinkering on sunday evening, and came up with a finished 'product' on wednesday evening. it uses a lovely thin typeface set entirely in white, and pulls beautiful stock imagery down from unsplash every so often to keep things interesting. my 'speed dial' links are literally closer than ever, I can peer deeper in to interesting news links on the computer I'd actually like to read them on, and I can quickly operate itunes, all from an elegant, minimal interface. the clock even softly ticks with every passing second, like the desk clock of someone much wealthier and more sophisticated than I. it's not without its small bugs, but considering the dev time, I'm rather proud of myself. :)
the best part of all of this? given my current going rate I bill out to clients, I would have charged somewhere around $4000 to build it (even more had it been a rush job), and it runs on a $300 ipad of yesteryear – the likes of which, is propped up to optimal viewing / touching angle by a cardboard box, a pencil, a bit of duct tape binding the two to my desk: costing around 2 bucks and a bit of ingenuity.
while it wouldn't take much to turn it around as something that could be sold, I worry that it's a bit specialized to my needs to have a broader appeal. but I think it looks damn pretty; and if nothing else, it looks very nice on my desk. :D
*this is not to say that Panic's StatusBoard isn't any good – it's just not what I want out of a HUD. much love to Panic and everything they do. please don't sue me.