So there’s been a lot of talk about a cool concept program coming out of the blur of Mugshot. While the exact goals of the project do seems a little more Web 2.0, the basic UI layout and goals seems to be remote services for something like Dashboard. Dashboard was the precursor to Beagle, (initially designed as an indexing and storage backed for Dashboard) and is basically a meta-clue processing center which brings up information relevant to whatever your are doing. The initial screenshots are extraordinarily old, but last summer during SoC, a complete redesign and recode took place, which is what can currently be found in the Google Code repo. While Dashboard is missing a lot of polish, I would recommend taking a look at its clue processing system, as its really quire ingenious, and the dream of every Beagle developer to eventually have to time to make it a real working solution again.
Anyways, I know its not the exact same, but its probably worth at lest a few minutes of playing time. 
April 5th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Joe Shaw might not want you to display his AIM handle and phone number quite so prominently. You might want to blur that.
April 5th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Thanks for the concern, Owen.
It’s not my real phone number, and my AIM handle has been out there for 3 years and nobody has bothered me, so I don’t really care.
Joe
April 5th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Yeah, Sorry, I probably should have thought of that before I used it, its just a super-old screenshot from nat.org, its the only one I could find =/
April 5th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
I had looked at Dashboard a while ago when Nat first put it out and it was pretty exciting. I think we’ve taken some of the lessons learned from it to heart in Big Board. Particularly I think Dashboard learned that you don’t really want lots of activity going on in your sidebars as it becomes distracting to your work and such we worked to make sure Big Board doesn’t repeat that mistake.
While Dashboard is a sidebar like thing as well as Big Board there really aren’t many similarities to them. I would say Dashboard is watching what you do in order to make your current use of an application more extensive by providing lots of extra meta-data about what you’re doing.
Big Board isn’t watching what you’re doing inside any application. The Mugshot client does watch what kind of applications you run in order to relay anonymous application statistics used for the popularity rankings. Big Board then uses that usage data to provide you with a better “recently used” like application menu. The focus of Big Board is to give you quick access to the apps you run, the documents you use, and the people you want to connect with.