It turns out there are already quite a few customisable homepage systems on the net. By far the best that I have found is at netvibes.com. Others include myYahoo!, iGoogle, Pageflakes and Goowy. All of these are very functional, however none of them seem to have been designed with accessibility in mind. This means that accessing the interface from a mobile device such as a phone or PSP may inhibit the user experience. Hopefully I’ll be able to develop CHUI in such a way as to allow users to access their customised homepage from any device.
I have also discovered box.net. An online storage website that offers a free 1GiB account. Box.net also offer an API which is used in both Goowy and Netvibes. This is interesting but I have not found out whether they also offer FTP access, which would be useful if people prefer to use their own client. I have just contacted Box.net and hope to receive information on their API.
I will now be writing this up in a more extensive and formal manor.
Next step: Discuss CHUI in context of the discovered (similar) user interfaces
RE: Box.net’s API.
I received a reply from them, saying that the API would be launching by November. It’s still not launched though, I’ll try contacting them again.
RE: Netvibes.
I’ve been using Netvibes non-stop since I discovered it. I was originally put down by how well it was built and the amount of features it supports (not to mention the extensibility via it’s API), though now I see it as more of a challenge - sort of like a quality baseline.
One idea would be to add Facebook compatibility to CHUI, this is one thing that Netvibes does not currently have.