What's Happening? HOW-TO

What's Happening? HOW-TO				About: Research
Setting up the communication-bar Unix Windows NT Mac		Setting up the screen-saver Unix Windows NT Mac		About: Research

Introduction

The "What's Happening" communication-bar is a news and chat monitor. It fits nicely in a corner of your desktop without taking much screen real-estate. It cycles through various news blurbs and chat messages without detracting much attention. With it, not only can you keep track of what's going on in the College today, but also get updated on the hot topics in the computing world. Please visit the community awareness research page to see the sample screen-dumps and the available types of content.

The "What's Happening" screen-saver, on the other hand, is a continuously-regenerated image collage of the College web site: it randomly crawls the College web site and finds pages that contain images; then it randomly lays out these images and fills your screen with the collage. In addition, from time to time, it shows other up-to-date information such as that in the communication-bar, Atlanta weather and traffic conditions, etc. Please visit the web image collage page to see what the screen-saver is showing now.

The "What's Happening" tools won't slow down your system because all the compute-intensive tasks are done at our server -- what you'll use are simple display-clients. In order to use the tools, your computer must be able to connect to CoC systems, either directly on the CoC network or indirectly via the Internet. See the installation notes for your platform for details.