Re: online desktop APIs

["BJörn Lindqvist" <bjourne gmail com>]

On 4/15/07, Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote:
> 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.

I don't understand. What is Mugshot then? What is it not? To me, it is
not clear what the intended audience is, if there is one.

> > 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.

Then lets start small. For example, it would be useful and fun to have
GNibbles upload your high score to the Mugshot server. Then you could
compare your high score with other Gnibbles players. If that works well
enough you could abstract it out into a general UploadYourHighscore
API suitable for all high score tracking games, Gnometris, Mines etc.

Then you'd also have to solve obvious security flaws like how to
prevent people from cheating on their high score.

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

How about FreeCiv? Last I played it, it had big problems with server
outages and to few players available to find a game. Maybe Mugshot
could help with both finding players and be a stable server to play
on? Or is that out of scope for Mugshot?

> >> 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...

You have basically answered every single question I have asked about
Mugshot with "Sounds good, we will have that." :) Are there some cool
and "online" things Mugshot is not?

> > 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.

I think there is more to it than that. For example, in Sweden the most
popular community site is www.lunarstorm.com. Naturally, to attract
Swedish "community people" you would need to hook Mugshot up to
that. For news feeds you'd like to subscribe to sites such as
www.aftonbladet.se or www.idg.se instead of www.cnn.com.

There are a lot of those kind of problems if you want to attract
"everyone." And that is only the technical part of it. For example, I
don't think anyone could ever convince me to use MySpace no matter how good
their site is technically.

--
mvh Björn