Ask HN: What would you do with a touchscreen monitor?

5 points·mcav··6 comments

I recently bought a 12-inch touchscreen display off of eBay. I figured it would be cool to put some kind of status monitor, weather, etc. on it and mount it on the wall. A regular LCD would work to display that information too, though.

Any ideas on what would be interesting/useful/cool to display on there (particularly anything that would take advantage of its touch capability)?

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I'm in the home automation business and this is what I do all day. Complex tasks become very intuitive when you use pretty graphics and simple layouts.

If you need ideas for widgets, check out what the guys at http://www.chumby.com have done.

I'd use it full-screen with pyGame and experiment with implementing the view part of MVC and alternative user interface (that requires no keyboard nor mouse) think gestures, taps, etc. Direct manipulation has a huge promise when applied on a larger scale. Look at iPhone / iPod Touch and the various Surface systems for inspiration.

I'd use it to write myself notes, or calendar, or to-do list. Basically, an electronic whiteboard.

I would put my current hobby project on the back-burner, and I'd start playing with ways to interface with the computer using natural gestures. That's a topic that's always fascinated with me - and is becoming more and more relevant.

I'd try and run android with it.

probably clean it constantly :-/

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