Help me set up my mission control room.

March 21, 2011 3:23 PM

I am interested in wall-mounting a TV in my office conference room with visions of all sorts of cool uses like presentations, video conferencing (skype?), and monitoring live twitter streams. Has anyone seen a nice example of such a setup?

I'm interested in recommendations on setup, software etc. We are primarily mac folks in my office - so OSx based computer software is preferable.

posted by jlowen to Technology (3 answers total)

If you install the Apple Developer Tools ($4.99 download, unless you already have a developer account) you get a Quartz Composer development tool as well as example screensavers ("compositions") to give you some ideas on how to get started.

One such demo composition shows a Twitter feed. It is available at: /Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Compositions/XML/The Twitterverse/The Twitterverse.qtz

Other examples include a visual RSS feed composition.

Just open up the composition in Quartz Composer to see how it is wired together. You can put a composition into your home folder's screensavers folder and set up a hot corner in System Preferences, so that you can start up a screensaver on demand.

If you like getting your hands dirty, you could pretty easily make your own Tweet-feed, RSS-news-feed, streaming presentations, visual effect full-screen all-in-one app — making it look and behave the way you want it to.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:45 PM on March 21, 2011

See also Panic Blog » The Panic Status Board
posted by Brian Puccio at 5:24 PM on March 21, 2011

We have something similar at the college where I work. I'm not 100% sure about mac compatibility, but http://www.fourwindsinteractive.com/
Take a look at that, you can use lightweight computers and HD tvs to show the content.
posted by tropikal at 7:00 PM on March 21, 2011