Help regarding design

[Ronni_design]

Hi,

I am planning to make a web interface which would show whether a person is busy or not. Basic visualiztion would be traffic lights(Green-when free, Red -when busy). I am a student and it is for my department. We have a big display in the common area and if the design is cool it would be displayed there everytime. It should be fun so that people dont get bored seeing the same thing all the time. There are around 20 people on the floor.

I searched for some cool visualization apis such as goolge charts or google gauge but was not able to get anything which would be fun. Can you please suggest any cool idea which would suit the purpose. It would be nice if there is an existing javascript library that does some cool visualization. If the api doesnt exist then maybe i can make it using photoshop and then adapt it in code.

Please help me out here.

[JMRKER]

Are the 20 people using the same computer?
If not, JS might not be the language of choice.
It is a client-side language and works best on a single browser.

A server-side language like PHP or PERL would be a better choice for what I believe you're wanting.

[Ronni_design]

20 people are on different computers but connected via LAN. It will be hosted in the local server that we have.
I am using Java for server side. I will take the settings for a user and store it in a DB. This web visualization will just read the data and visualize it.

[JMRKER]

So what have you designed thus far? What sort of input/output do you expect to use/see?

[Ronni_design]

this is a visualization of email data. i gather data such as unread msgs, size etc and calculate a factor of how busy that person is. This has to be visualized in such a way that when someone else sees this visualization he gets an idea that when that person's inbox is relatively free, so that that he can mail that person at that time, increasing the chances of his mail getting read.

[JMRKER]

Not possible with JS alone.

[Ronni_design]

But the visualization would be using JS n css rite?

[JMRKER]

But the visualization would be using JS n css rite?

Don't forget the HTML. Now back to post #4...that's the visualization of which you speak.

[Ronni_design]

i am not concerned bout what technologies to use, i want an idea which would be cool. after getting such an idea of how to show that stuff then i think i can focus on what tech to use to make it happen. As of now, the bar charts and traffic lights are too basic.