[openbeos] Re: 3rd Party Opportunities

(I'm replying to Simon's original message [again] because this thought is more applicable here than a little further down the thread.) 
Simon Taylor wrote:
I don't think I could name a piece of software I have used which hasn't contained something that feels under-designed. I would love Haiku to be the system which people don't consider releasing software for without making sure it has been properly thought out (in the same way people writing Mac OS X software try very hard on the visual design side of things). The best way of attaining this goal is to set a good example, and some kind of unified umbrella organisation that goes about projects the right way should help a great deal in this regard.
How should this be connected to Haiku? Well if the software is good enough no formal connection will probably be necessary, the organisation's software will become the defacto products used on Haiku systems. A simple statement of support for the effort from the Haiku project would be helpful too, I suppose.
I know that I've been out of touch and out of the community for most of the last four years or so and I acknowledge I most likely am overlooking something, but I don't know of any user interface APIs made available in an attempt to unify the look and feel of BeOS/Haiku applications since the release of Santa's Gift Bag.
If an organization is formed to help accomplish the well developed look and feel for BeOS/Haiku applications, one of its first actions should be to put together an open source (preferably MIT or BSD style license) project that provides a wealth of user interface elements and common functionality such as drag and drop support. Being open source under a MIT or BSD license will allow developers to choose their projects' destiny (open/closed source) rather than slaving them to GPL, in addition to allowing us to get to work on our applications' functionality instead of reinventing the wheel [on top of the Be API] every time we start a new project. By being offered by an organization separate from Haiku, it would just be an option to a developer wishing to do things from scratch.
Like I said, I may and probably have overlooked similar efforts, and this is just off the top of my head so it's not completely well thought out... ;) 

Raymond

--
Raymond C. Rodgers
http://www.raymondrodgers.com/

Other related posts: