online desktop quick update

["Havoc Pennington" <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

I was on vacation last week, so didn't send out any mail.

Current work
===

Here's some stuff people are working on:

  http://live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop/Sprints

I just pushed a new version of the server side to
http://dogfood-online.gnome.org:9080, which may have invitations
working a bit better, but may also have the XMPP stuff a little
broken, not sure. It's a devel snapshot.

We're trying to get the GUADEC demo back up and running with all-GNOME
branding rather than Mugshot, that is almost done now I think.

You can now run the "online desktop engine" dbus service and it does
not start the Mugshot Stacker UI in your system tray.

When you log in to GDM selecting the Online Desktop session, Colin
made the browser start by default, and he and Bryan put together an
about:blank replacement called Journal to be the default browser
content. I'll let them put this up and blog about it when they are
ready. We discussed some today whether this default browser page plus
a background daemon and/or changes to the bottom panel config could
replace BigBoard, not sure how that will play out.

I put Tomboy hacking on hold for a bit while we fix some of the more
basic aspects and get switched from mugshot->gnome, but plan to get
back to Tomboy.

Some Ideas on Platform Work
===

Another thought I had today, we could think of the platform
enhancements we  would like as "break down the browser/desktop
barrier" specifically three changes:

 1) make it easy to do dbus communication between JavaScript
extensions and the desktop (both directions)

 2) export the HTTP stack (cookies, cache, etc.) so it's shared with browser

 3) have a merged gnome-keyring and browser-password-remembering
feature, that can also be used by e.g. Gossip to get your GTalk
password based on how you logged in to google.com (and store all this
stuff on the net)

Any of those would be very useful projects, independent of which (if
any) online desktop UI ideas work out.

Open Social Network
===

If you haven't seen it, here is an interesting post about federating
social network data (server-to-server API):

  http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

Brad brings up many of the same issues we're facing for GNOME Online
Desktop, specifically his first goal "make the social graph a
community asset" and some discussion of having a nonprofit host the
service.

We already have OpenID on the list of projects it would be good to see
for online.gnome.org so maybe experimenting with Brad's stuff would be
another idea if anyone is looking for a server coding project.

Havoc