Re: online desktop APIs

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

BJörn Lindqvist wrote:
> Who are "we"?

Whoever is interested in the project, same as any other open source 
project. If someone thinks it would be fun to work on then they are 
welcome, if they don't then they'll work on something else.

It doesn't have to be people working on GNOME right now and it doesn't 
have to be people from Red Hat. In fact some of the interest has been 
from people who are neither of those. But obviously GNOME and Red Hat 
developers are welcome.

I don't think this general direction has to be "the GNOME direction" I 
see it as more of an offshoot like Maemo or One Laptop.

> Then would it be possible to add
> some gaming to Mugshot? It would be pretty fun to play Gnometris
> against someone over the Mugshot server. Or even better,
> GnomeScrabble! Can you imagine how many grandmas would instantly
> switch to GNOME if playing scrabble was as easy as Programs -> Games
> -> GnomeScrabble??

Absolutely. This was something we looked into starting with in fact, as 
an initial demo of the "online desktop" idea, the main reason we didn't 
do it is that when I researched it I couldn't find a game codebase I 
thought I could modify in only a week or two, it looked like all of them 
would take more like a month or two to make them work well.

The way I'd approach this is to use some parts of the mugshot server to 
coordinate the game and choose players, and then probably set up a 
peer-to-peer connection or switch to a dedicated server to send the 
actual game moves.

gnome-games has a bunch of network game code already as a starting 
point, I think it would be awesomer though if there were no 
configuration; you just start up the game and there's a list of your 
online friends (same one you see on mugshot.org now or in the bigboard 
mockups or would see in the "online desktop" IM app). You pick the 
friends you want to play with and click go and they get an offer to 
play, even if they aren't running the game. Other friends may see a 
notification on their desktop that you are now playing, too, and can 
pile on (assuming it's the sort of game where that makes sense).

There are other games worth network-izing too, one of the best ones is 
Frozen Bubble unfortunately it is a single giant perl file...

You can also look here to see which games are most popular, at least for 
the small sample size we have so far:
http://mugshot.org/applications?category=games

> >   2) it's a "see everything your friends are doing online" application
> >   in particular, that looks at music people are playing, blog posts,
> >   facebook activity, new photos, etc. and pulls that together into a
> >   timeline. It also has links from someone's Mugshot page to their other
> >   profiles. But it isn't intended to *replace* any of those things.
>
> Why is that useful?

Well, a lot of people are using it and I find it useful or at least 
entertaining - if you don't find it useful then you don't; not everyone 
uses every app, and this is just one app.

I'm not sure how to explain how it's useful; I like to see people's 
music and pictures and things, but if that isn't self-evidently useful 
to you, maybe the app isn't useful to you. Not a problem.

> > We really need help on the huge list on
> > http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Where_I%27m_At_Locations by the way
> > ;-) (including adding more to it, and adding more detail on what to
> > watch on each service, but also of course on implementation!)
>
> I'm sometimes lurking in desktop-devel-list gnome org, does that
> count? :) What about game servers and message boards?

Sounds good, yup. We've been meaning to add Wii ID support too...

> Also, how do you plan to bridge language barriers? An English
> community site is only good for native English speakers.

A needed task for the mugshot.org server is to i18n-ify it; there was a 
short thread on this in the mugshot list archives.

If you post stuff in non-English it should already work though (we seem 
to be Unicode clean for the most part, as far as we know - though this 
was way more work than it should have been because for some reason every 
piece of web and database infrastructure seems to have the idea that 
Latin-1 is a reasonable default...)

Someday we might need to filter content in languages people don't 
understand or something like that, not sure exactly how we'd do so, but 
I don't think we need to do it until it becomes a problem.

Havoc