A few weeks ago, we started working on a new dashboard service. Today, we released our first version of CentralBoard.app
The problem of our time is, that we miss new products, changes and information in the blink of an eye, where we can’t extract the best result for you and us. We have the same problem, where we want to watch our clients error logs, website-requests, but also new apps or the trending news about the tech branch on one screen.
To cover this problem we decided to program a dashboard service, that allows everyone to create dashboards without knowing too much about where to get the information from. We also give the experienced users the possibility to bring custom information to the board. Our goal is to develop a service for everyone.
What is CentralBoard?
CentralBoard is a service, where you can create your own dashboard, without needing to care about the tech stuff (like refreshing and scaling). We offer you a drag & drop editor for your dashboard with a bunch of widgets and layouts. We are releasing new widgets every couple days, but we also allow to bring your own data to the dashboard over JSON.
We never save your requested data like the response of the JSON, iCal or Apple Cloud Photo. If we need to store something of your like a link or unique setting we store it encrypted.
Do I need a dashboard?
We think everyone needs a dashboard. A Dashboard doesn’t mean it is just a browser-startpage — it can be an Smart/Magic Mirror for your bathroom or the team board in your office. With CentralBoard you can create the perfect overview for your environment.
Some example how we use CentralBoard:
Homeoffice
Each of our team members use CentralBoard to see the current news, weather and time on their current location. But also, because we can handle custom JSON, everyone can see his own tickets for the day. We don’t need to open each website to get the latest news, find the weather app, or open our project management system — everything is right on your dashboard.
Office Room
Most of the developers know the problem, during daily meetings, someone is telling a solution for a problem, that has happened, but you don’t know what has happened. To prevent this problem, you can attach a CentralBoard Dashboard in the team office room, so each of your workmates can see what’s going on before you start the meeting. Good widgets for this are yoour team calendar, tickets about the project, latest bugreports lists or traffic graphs.
Smart/Magic Mirror
You wake up, you start your morning routine. While you take a shower, or brush your teeth, you think about what you want to wear today. Your Problem? You don’t know how the weather is today and whether you maybe need to cover your skin today because the UV-Index is too high. CentralBoard can cover this. We developed a clean and simple layout for smart mirrors, so you can light up your mirrors and get the weather, news and your mails directly on your mirror.
Influencer
As an Influencer, followers, likes and comments are a part of business. With a dashboard, the view of how many Followers your accounts have and a view of some inspiring images from other accounts or hashtags are a good way to be more efficient than your competitors.
Why should I use CentralBoard?
We know how frustrating it can be to develop a product for different systems and to introduce changes to each system. Based on this problem, we split our dashboard and widgets, so that your widget is a single module that can be used over and over for each of your dashboards. So if you change a widget, each of your Dashboards will receive the update. That means if you are running multiple dashboards in your company and you change the project management system, you only need to change the widget, that gets data of this system and all of your dashboard take the new data-source. We also designed our editor with known elements, so you don’t need to be a developer to understand the GUI, e.g. if you type in a JSON address for your JSON-Widget, we will generate a default theme. We currently also develop a database for public and known news addresses, so you don’t need to find the RSS response of your loved news-portal.
How do I start?
CentralBoard is free. Your first dashboard is completely free, where you can also use every widget. If you just want to test our service, you don’t have to pay for a dashboard or extra widgets. But if you want to use our service a bit more professional, you can pay to get more widget slots and better refresh timing of widgets. With your free account you can create one Dashboard and you can set up 4 widgets.
How can I access my own dashboard?
CentralBoard generate a unique URL, that you can access without login. You can set this URL as your browser start page or set up a Raspberry Pi to open your Dashboard in Kiosk mode. In the near future, we will release some tutorials to set up a Raspberry Pi.
