from Hacker News

Panic Status Board is being discontinued

by cicloid on 11/29/16, 5:06 AM with 107 comments

  • by rdtsc on 11/29/16, 6:13 AM

    > “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.

  • by mikeknoop on 11/29/16, 6:17 AM

    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.

  • by decasia on 11/29/16, 5:48 AM

    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

  • by Animats on 11/29/16, 6:15 AM

    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.

  • by intoverflow2 on 11/29/16, 10:18 AM

    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.

  • by nodesocket on 11/29/16, 6:11 AM

    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.

  • by deanclatworthy on 11/29/16, 7:03 AM

    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.

  • by cyberferret on 11/29/16, 6:26 AM

    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'...

  • by omouse on 11/29/16, 2:53 PM

    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.

  • by Wouter33 on 11/29/16, 9:51 AM

    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.

  • by breul99 on 11/29/16, 7:56 AM

    Open source it.

  • by themodelplumber on 11/29/16, 6:13 AM

    > 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.