Re: [gnome-love] GSOC 2008 advice

["natan yellin" <aantny gmail com>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 3:18 PM, Luis Villa <luis tieguy org> wrote:

One followup, one other suggestion, one followup.

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 2:49 PM, Luis Villa <luis tieguy org> wrote:
>  * "widgets": Vista, OSX, and KDE4 all have widgets/gadgets/Kthingies
>  that are pretty, very easy to use, very easy to develop (since they
>  are web-based), and which display more information when needed while
>  staying hidden when not needed (both unlike our panel applets.) Some
>  work has already been done on doing this with gtk-webkit[1]- perhaps
>  that could be built on? (It seems to me that from a user perspective
>  this approach is really superior to applets and what we should be
>  focusing on long-term instead of reworking applets, but YMMV.)

Both screenlets and gdesklets have been pointed out to me offlist. I
was aware of both of them, but I didn't mention them here because I
don't think writing our own custom widgets is the way to go- we should
(at least to start) join the html-based widget bandwagon everyone else
is already on so that we can benefit from that base of applications.
Perhaps adding HTML widget support to one of them is the right thing,
though.

I think that it would make the most sense to create wrappers for the existing html/xml widget formats (e.g. Widgets, Gadgets, Yidgets, etc.). There's already a Screenlet wrapper for Super Karamba widgets.

The advantages of wrapping are obvious. They'll act like all other universal applets and will be able to be displayed everywhere that universal applets can.

Natan

Suggestion:
* backup: Apple's Time Machine is the greatest thing since sliced
bread. Sadly, as is common with Apple apps, Linux has had all the
pieces in place for this for ages (rdiff-backup, etc.) but never put
it together in one sweet package. You could do that.

caveat/advice:
This is Summer of Code; changes building on established codebases are
(IMHO) most likely to be sucessful. It may be appealing to take on big
projects, but be careful not to bite off more than you can chew.

Luis

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