[haiku-development] Re: I'm interested in developing a project for Haiku

  • From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 16:31:56 -0500

2009/10/31 Alexey Burshtein <aburst02@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> PS: If this project is approved, we'll need also a cool name for it :)

While coming up with a name before even working on a project can
sometimes be putting the cart before the horse (to use a metaphor), I
just happened to think of a decent name for a calendar app a few weeks
ago: Timeline. It's simple, the name makes it fairly obvious what it
would do, and the name could also inspire an interesting visualization
for showing "the big picture" of one's calendar as a timeline graph.
Also I see there are already sort of mini timelines per day in your
representation of the calendar GUI. As far as I know no major software
is called Timeline.

Also I have had an idea for a while of a Haiku "schedule_server" for
running scheduled tasks, and I think that would make a nice part of
this project. I see you already have an EventDaemon in the UML diagram
and I assume that is essentially what I'm talking about. As a note
generally background processes in BeOS and now Haiku are called
<something>_server, such as app_server, midi_server, media_server,
debug_server, etc. So the name for the event or scheduling program
should be either event_server or schedule_server or even more
explicitly scheduled_task_server. I think event_server might be a
little ambiguous though. In my opinion this applies as much to third
party software as built-in software, plus this project should
hopefully be integrated into Haiku one day.

Also I think there already may be a few projects for BeOS for doing
this sort of thing, which you may either want to use or at least
reference. I know this is a school project and you want to learn but
it still makes sense to use other code if it is available. Some to
check out would be Michael Lotz's Remember
(http://bebits.com/app/4205) and Axel Dörfler's theScheduler
(http://bebits.com/app/1711). Though only the former is open source
AFAIK.

Finally while I have not used it myself, the marketing for the Palm
Pre smart phone touts how it can merge multiple online calendars into
one view. While this sounds fairly simple to me (and I imagine most
desktop software can already do this), it would still be another
worthwhile feature to consider for this project.

As for mentoring I think I'm already spread too thin to be the primary
mentor for this project, but I'd be willing to provide some input now
and then (and I expect most other Haiku developers would too.)

-- 
Regards,
Ryan

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