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

  • From: Patrick Kelly <kameo76890@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 20:11:08 -0500



On Nov 5, 2009, at 17:52, Alexey Burshtein <aburst02@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> 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.

I've registered the project on Berlios.de (http://haiku- pim.berlios.de, the site is still empty now; I'll start filling it up during the weekend). There is an option to create polls there, and towards the end of the project I'll arrange a poll and a voting for the name. "Timeline" is not a name of the software application AFAIK, but it is a name of a novel written by M. Crichton and of a movie based on it, and I don't want to get into troubles with Paramount Pictures :) Not only the name, we'll need a cool icon too :)


Wouldn't want to disrespect Crichton. Otherwise I would think it should be fine, so long as no product has the same name.

While bland, there's always the option of using a generic.
> 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.

This can cause misunderstanding, since I'm sure there will be users who think schedule_server or scheduled_task_server is the actual kernel thread short-term scheduler. Then they'll kill it and wonder why the system still runs. Besides, in my opinion, only system tasks should be called "_server", the others should be called "daemons" or somehow else, to distinguish between system-critical software and 3rd party applications - and while this Organizer is not a part of Haiku, it is considered 3-rd party and will be named accordingly.

> 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.

There are many projects to borrow from, both for BeOS and for other OS. For example, the minimal time quantum of 5 mins (mentioned in User Story) is borrowed from alarm clock and organizer supplied with PalmOS 5.2. It was more then enough for me during all 3 years I was using Palm Zire, and I guess no-one actually needs finer accuracy.

> 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.

Networking features are currently out of scope. They'll be considered again if we have time at the end of the project. However, we had some interesting thoughts regarding integration into other Haiku programs; more specifically, "People". :)

> 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.)

Thank you very much. I would appreciate if you'd lift some of this burden from Michael's shoulders.

Thanks,
Alexey.

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