I am opening this topic as a spin-off from a couple other topics. The concept is for a dashboard feature.

In many applications, the concept of a dashboard is a feature/window that sums up relevant information for the application and user. Much like a dashboard does in a car; your driving speed, remaining fuel, engine temp, and so on.

Essentially, BD has attempted to do something like this since v3.0 with its

• 3 lifer counts at the bottom of the main window
• background report telling you what you are likely to see at any user defined location for the current time of eyar

But we could do much better. Two main questions:

1. The BIG Question - What should be in this dashboard?
2. Should it be in its own child window (like the other windows inside the main window in BD) or should it exist in the background of the main window like the background report does now?

My thoughts for #1 above:

• some bar graphs showing current life counts (annual and lifetime) for selected locations, taxonomies, users
• last sighting entry (bird, location, observers) - when you last went birding.
• What else?

Let's get this started.

Jeff

oooh, where to start with ideas. This is going to be fun

1 - The dashboard should be in its own window. That way users can dismiss it, resize it and new features can be added with more ease (I hope). The dashboard window should open automatically when you open Birders Diary.
2 - Show life counts. Counts of interest are 1) Global Life Count 2) Continental Life Count, 3) Country Life Count and 4) State(s) Life counts. Of course, a life count for your favourite location (e.g. yard) shoud be included as well. For some people ABA/AOU regions may be of interest as well.
3 - Link life counts to a standard report. It would be awesome if you can tie the life count feature (item 2) in with a report. Click on the life count number and a predesigned report opens that lists all the species. Most of the building blocks of features 2 and 3 are already present in Birder's Diary.
4 - List of total species seens since the beginning of the year. I think it'll be fine that locations in this list are the same as the locations listed under item 2.
5 - Graph or table showing total species seen by year (perhaps with option to filter by location can be added in a later release).
6 - Buttons that will open checklist entry and keyboard entry. It may be a minor duplication of the button bar, that that is OK.
7 - Button/list (if feasible) to your reports. Click on the list and report opens.

The count feature at the bottom can be replaced with the dashboard and the background report can be removed in my opinion.

Gerco
 

Dashboards are very cool. Anything that can be queried in a report should be able to be a pane in a dashboard. I.e. Any sort of county, state, country, year, life, etc list. Graphs would be cool, things that show progress over time, such as year list over time graph. One idea also is to make an option to have the background for BD be your dashboard. That is certainly what I would do. I'd love to be able to have a dashboard that shows the various state lists, country lists, county lists etc. Another idea is savable dashboards. I.e. a savable set of dashboards, just like savable reports. So if I was living in Kansas (like I am now), I could load up the "Kansas County Lists" dashboard that shows me my county lists - Possibly something like:

-----------------------------------------------------------
| Johnson County - 77
|
| Most Recent County Bird: Eurasian Collared Dove
____________________________________________


A good place to go to get ideas, just in terms of how dashboards could work is jazz.net which is an IBM site. If you register on the site Jeff, you can actually go look at project dashboards for IBM projects, such as here: jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.dashboard.viewDashboard&team=RTC%20Development

What I like about the Team Concert Dashboards is aside from being customizable on what you want to see, they are also movable, so you can drag them around the dashboard and organize them exactly how you want to display the data.