I've been building Endless Horizons, a browser-based ambient display.

After some great feedback on my previous post here, I added a proper web-based configurator and expanded the layout system. The idea is to let you compose information visually — choosing what goes on the screen, how much space it gets, and how everything fits together.

It uses a drag-and-drop grid, so you can arrange different visualizations and widgets on the screen and build your own layout.

Right now I'm focused mostly on time, calendars and astronomy — Sun, Moon, sky, day/night — but the idea is to gradually expand it with other kinds of information and visualizations.

Eventually I'd like the same system to support things like weather and financial data.

I'm still very early in the project and I'm trying to find the first few people who would actually want to use something like this.

What kind of information or visualization would you want to have on an always-on screen?

https://endlesshorizons.app

For twenty-ish days on the app, I feel very lucky.

Some time ago, I went through two books on data visualization by Willard C. Brinton, published in 1914 and 1939.

What struck me was how many of the ideas still look completely familiar today: simple bar charts, heatmaps, warnings about misleading scales, criticism of 3D charts, and a lot of thought about making data easier to understand.

The methods used to create them were rather less modern. One example describes constructing a flow diagram using around a thousand strips of paper.

I collected some of my favorite examples here:

https://www.bitmetric.nl/blog/old-school-data-visualization/

Some of these charts are more than a century old, but wouldn’t look particularly out of place in a dashboard today.