
Panic Status Board is being discontinued - cicloid
https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-status-board/
======
rdtsc
> “want a status board” budget: companies would buy a $3,000 display for our
> $10 app.

I do this irrational stuff all the time. $15 for a wedge of cheese I haven't
tried before - yap totally fine. A $2.59 app - hmm, yeah, not sure, think
about for 5 minutes, read reviews, seems expensive, what if I don't like it,
pass...

I know it is ridiculous and I see me doing it, but it still happens.

~~~
copperx
That part of the post-mortem is inaccurate.

I was looking recently for a solution to display a status board for a small
business on an HDTV. 40" TVs can be found for $180 (you don't have to spend
$3000 to have something useful), a mount is $20, and the app is $10. You've
got most of the components for $210, but then you have to stomach the $200-400
to buy an iPad which will sit unused taped behind the TV just to display the
status board. Not to mention you have to secure it to prevent theft if the TV
is on a high traffic area.

The idea that you have to sacrifice an iPad doesn't feel right to me, even
though you could get an Apple TV for roughly the same price (< $150), but the
Apple TV would provide more functionality (e.g., the Apple TV could be used as
an impromptu projector through AirPlay).

They chose the wrong platform for the app. They should have developed it for
the Apple TV.

~~~
toomuchtodo
They should've sold HDMI dongles (think Chromecast or Roku), with the app
baked in, for ~$100. Its easy to monday morning quarterback though; This idea
could've failed as well.

~~~
pryelluw
I currently do that for in-store displays. Its easy to setup because you can
do a nice GUI with a powerful enough board and habe access through SSH if
required. I sell it to small businesses as a turn key solution (just add a tv)
for less than four hundred dollars. Most have enjoyed good success with it
because it allows automatic upsells. Ive yet to use one as a status board but
I might give it a try.

~~~
corobo
There's definitely the market for it, it was part of a job I had in a previous
life. (Almost) every company has an IT department and they and their managers
like to see cool status displays. It's a pretty easy sell.

~~~
pryelluw
Ive thought about it but it requires a certain level of technical capabilities
on the businesse's side. Truth is that most businesses run on shitty old
windows machines that dont get updated. Integrating with those systems
requires building an infrastructure for them and then selling at a low price
because they dont see the value in IT. That's why I sell it as a self
contained marketing/sales tool.

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mikeknoop
The Panic status board is near to my heart. Back in 2010, their launch blog
post was something that inspired me to try and build products for people
instead of freelancing for a living.

It's really interesting/sad to read their second reason for shutting down:

> pro users are more likely to want a larger number of integrations with new
> services and data sources, something that’s hard to provide with limited
> revenue, which left the app “close but not quite” for many users

Because this is exactly what Zapier, the company I co-founded a year later,
provides for free to other companies/products. Integrate once with us and
automatically get integrations with hundreds of other apps (750+ and growing).

I love and use several Panic products (Transmit, Prompt, Firewatch) and hope
this end-of-life enables them to spend more time on new ideas.

~~~
debaserab2
I found Zapier's integrations to be very narrow (e.g., hitting only one major
use case at best) and cost prohibitive.

The concept sounded really cool, but then when it came down to actually using
in production I had a hard time arguing with myself: "Eh, why not spend a
night or two just building out this integration ourselves the exact way we
want instead of wasting that much money on something that doesn't even
completely fit the bill."

The subscription SaaS cost quickly supersedes the developer cost in a matter
of a few months, although I suppose it could have some niche uses with a proof
of concept/MVP.

~~~
Kiro
Are you seriously telling the founder of Zapier that the product sucks and
will never see success? I think Zapier is amazing and I know plenty of people
that feel the same. It's not some obscure thing.

~~~
debaserab2
No, I'm sharing why Zapier didn't work for me. Hope they have all the success
in the world.

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decasia
Anyone know other good alternatives to this project? I've used the open-source
Freeboard project[1] before, but curious what else is out there.

[1]
[https://github.com/Freeboard/freeboard](https://github.com/Freeboard/freeboard)

~~~
res0nat0r
Dashing from Etsy: [http://dashing.io/](http://dashing.io/)

~~~
morgante
Dashing is sadly abandoned. [0]

[0]
[https://github.com/Shopify/dashing/issues/711](https://github.com/Shopify/dashing/issues/711)

~~~
tnorthcutt
This fork looks actively maintained:
[https://github.com/SmashingDashboard/smashing](https://github.com/SmashingDashboard/smashing)

------
Animats
That's a business model problem. Your $10 app is being used to drive a
dedicated $3000 display. So what do you do? Sell integrated display and app
systems? It works for Bloomberg. You don't have to use Bloomberg's hardware
any more, but you don't save much by not doing so.

~~~
ams6110
> Sell integrated display and app systems? It works for Bloomberg.

Now you need a hardware support division, you need to buy, configure, and ship
hardware, handle returns, etc. and hardware is low margin compared to software
so there's little real profit to be made.

~~~
mcphage
> and hardware is low margin compared to software so there's little real
> profit to be made.

When you sell turn-key integrated products like that, you tend to sell the
integrated hardware at a much higher margin than if you were just selling the
hardware itself, because you don't break out individual component prices.

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intoverflow2
Releasing this on iPad instead of being a webapp never made any sense what so
ever. In a post disposable single board computer world it gets even more
ridiculous.

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nodesocket
Wonder if this is a case of the wrong pricing model? Status Board sold for
$9.99, perhaps they should have made it free in the app store, but require a
monthly subscription for data and integrations.

The monthly fees could also fund development of more 3rd party integrations.

~~~
rtpg
I think that there's more and more of an argument against one-time purchases
for apps that want continued development.

If all the digital artists in the world buy Photoshop, in order for Adobe to
justify continued support, they have to add marketable features. There's not
nearly as much of an incentive to support software. It all goes into features.

~~~
criddell
I think the need to constantly add more and more features to software isn't
necessarily a good thing. I think there are lots of software packages that
should slip into a maintenance mode.

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deanclatworthy
For anyone looking for an alternative geckoboard has the most integrations
I've seen, whilst still looking visually appealing.

I found others to look so boring and didn't have time to spend styling it and
making new widgets.

~~~
thirdsun
Admittedly it looks fantastic, but that's significant price tag.

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cyberferret
Damn. I've used Status Board for a while and love its simplicity. Shame to see
so many dashboard apps closing down this year. 2016 is definitely not 'Year of
the Dashboard'...

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omouse
Inspired by Panic Status Board and dismayed that it was not open source, I
tried to create my own, in php (not sure if the code is floating out there
somewhere) and man, it's bad to see such a great product go. Seriously, so
good it inspires one to write better looking software.

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Wouter33
We have been looking into a good solution for our office dashboard last month.
Evaluated a lot of solutions like Geckoboard, but eventually ended up using
Databox.com. Beautiful dashboards and also mobile apps.

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breul99
Open source it.

~~~
grzm
First comment from the post, from Cabel:

 _Oh, to head off one question at the pass: it’s not feasible for us to open
source Status Board. It contains code and frameworks shared among our apps
that we’re not quite ready to commit to the public domain. Sorry._

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themodelplumber
> as we’ve learned the hard way over the past couple of years, there’s not a
> lot of overlap right now between “pro” and “iOS”.

There's not a lot of overlap right now between "pro" and "Apple, Inc." Right
now I'd reckon Apple sees the puck heading for the laziest leisure class the
world has ever known.

