Re: Status of Dashboard

["Kevin Godby" <godbyk gmail com>]

'allo.

On 7/2/07, Joe Shaw <joe joeshaw org> wrote:
> I guess the only one of the three is libdashboard.
>
> Adding a library dependency is overkill for this problem.  The reason
> why we were able to crank out so many frontends (ie, application
> plugins) for the original dashboard was because all we had to do was
> #include a C file and run a single function.  No additional
> compile-time dependencies, no hassle.
>
> The new dashboard has both a D-Bus interface and a file system
> interface which allows you to drop files with clues in them into a
> well-known directory.  So even a .cP file probably isn't necessary.

That's good news.  Translating the pretty OO C# stuff to C looked like
a headache!

> > I'll willing to try and pick up the project.  I'm open to suggestions
> > for direction.  I'm currently reading a bunch of research papers that
> > seem relevant and trying to devise some vision/roadmap for the
> > project.
>
> I'd really suggest going back and reading the original site here:
>
>    http://nat.org/dashboard
>
> including the blog and screenshots to get a feel for what we were
> trying to do.  The hardest problem in there is probably finding a user
> interface that is useful and unintrusive.  Relevancy of the tiles
> presented is also going to be pretty darn tricky.

Some of the papers I've been glancing through address these problems a
bit.  I'm hoping to pull a lot of the ideas together soon.

I've been going over some of our old email in the archives and ran
across an old roadmap that still seems pretty relevant.  I'll also be
incorporating ideas I find in various papers.  At the moment I'm
working on reading a bunch and then letting it all stew in my head for
a bit.

> > Also, can you set up svn write access for Andrew and I?  I'm not sure
> > what the procedure is--Google just directed me to a page that said I
> > needed to contact a project owner to become a member.  (My Google
> > username is godbyk.)
>
> Sure, I'll try!

Seems to have worked -- at least I'm a project member.  Presumably
that means I can commit code now.

Thanks, Joe!

--Kevin Godby