Re: Redesigning Seahorse Main Window

[Stef Walter <stefw gnome org>]

On 2011-11-23 17:17, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> just to make sure: You are aware of the design work that is happening in
> https://live.gnome.org/Design/Proposals/UserIdentities ? There's a
> large overlap with seahorse there...

Yes, I saw those. They look good.

I'd like to work on them, and have been thinking on how to do that. Some
thoughts:

New project?

Will seahorse become this new project? I don't have have that much extra
time time to maintain both seahorse and another key manager app. So part
of this is probably trying to fit most/all the seahorse features into
this new design.

That shouldn't be too hard, but I hope it's works well with the
conceived design. I think it should. Many of the key / item specific
would go into the details view of that key item. I started a map of the
various features or UI elements, and we'd need to outline where they
would go.


Language

What language should we write this new design? Since a lot of this
design work invokes new UI paradigms that aren't in the standard GTK+
widgets, I'd like to be able to do some copying of code from similar
looking apps.

That means part of seahorse might need to be written in vala? I think we
have a pretty good story here. We have various backends which handle
interaction with gnupg, openssh, pkcs11, and gnome-keyring. So maybe we
would leave those mostly in C (I don't want to rewrite everything all
over again), but have some of the core stuff in vala.

Needs to look at details here.


Password Manager

I'd also like to make seahorse have a good story for a personal secret
manager (for storing PINs or other personal secrets), and that wasn't
really covered by the design, so that needs looking at.


That was just a brain dump, and I really looking forward to getting some
of this going as time allows.

Cheers,

Stef