I do agree with this prosal for making changes to the nvda add on process we might hopfully see more usful add ons that will greatly benifit many users. I have sugested a couple of possible add ons but was not given a very positive response if you don't want to use the add on then by all means don't use it. There are add ons that I don't feel that I don't have any use for but I am glad that they are there for those who chose to use them. I would still like to see an add for ie and the download manager this would read the progress bar in percentages just like in ie 8 it would also take you directly to the run or save or the open or save this file options. The second addon that I would to see is a add on that would give you the option to have your windows clock speakthe time in utc for those of us ham radio operaters who need to know what the utc time is on the fly to log a contact. This would automatically convert the time from your local time to utc time there would be a command to toggle between which time you wanted to hear. Rember that 24 hour time is not the same as utc time. 24 hour time is just your local timein 24 hour format thats what you hear if your listen to your polece scanner. Utc time is either 4 or 5 hours ahead of my local time for example I am on eastern time and utc time does not change with the time changesfor daylight savings time or standard ti
Brian Sackrider n8mnxme. On 1/29/2015 6:58 PM, James Teh wrote:
Hi all,This is a spin off from Joseph's proposal concerning Newfon, but the issue is much wider than that. This is something I've been meaning to post about for a while.At the moment, the bar for getting an add-on accepted and listed on addons.nvda-project.org is quite high. The great thing about this is that it ensures quality and that it can be used by users in as many languages as possible. The downside is that it is difficult for some useful add-ons to be submitted, which results in heavy usage of unofficial add-on repositories, opening users to illegal and potentially harmful add-ons. The reality is that some add-on authors don't care if their add-ons are super optimised, untranslated or unmaintained, and often, the majority of users don't care either. In fact, it simply doesn't make sense to translate some add-ons; e.g. an add-on for a piece of software which is itself monolingual. Sometimes, an add-on author might want to release an add-on to benefit the community but does not want to maintain it. Svox Pico, Festival and Newfon are good examples. NV Access and others don't want to maintain these, but they do benefit people, even unmaintained as they are.Furthermore, there is a burden on add-on maintainers to continue to release new versions of add-ons with new translations, etc. and sometimes even to fix bugs. This is often done without any help from the author and sometimes even after the author has long stopped caring about the add-on or disappeared. I feel this is an inefficient use of the maintainers' time and makes add-on maintenance a job that few will want or be able to do.While we do want to ensure some degree of quality (see below), the idea of the add-ons repository is to get useful stuff into the hands of users. An add-on doesn't have to serve everyone; it's good enough for it to serve a few. It's better that it serve some users rather than not being available to anyone or being obtained from questionable sources. NVDA itself is strictly quality controlled and users can rely on this, but I don't think this needs to be the case for the entire add-ons repository. Certainly, this is how add-on repositories for most other software work.So, here's a rough outline of how I think things could work:1. When an add-on is submitted, it still needs to be reviewed. However, rather than reviewing for absolute code quality, the review should just cover major problems such as malicious code, unintentionally harmful code, major security hazzards, critical crashes, illegal activity, etc. Other suggestions can be made, but they shouldn't be requirements. 2. It shouldn't be required that every add-on is translatable or fully translated before it is released. However, if an add-on isn't translatable or fully translated, it should be clearly indicated to users that it will only work in specified languages. 3. Add-on authors should be responsible for making new releases of their add-ons, even if just to include new translations. Of course, translating can still be delegated to the translators, but it's up to the add-on authors to work with the translators and make their intentions clear. 4. If there are major problems of the kind noted above reported for an add-on by users without any intention from the add-on author to rectify them within a certain period (perhaps 3 months), the maintainers have the right to remove the add-on. This allows for a certain degree of trust without being overly burdensome. 5. Of course, these are just guidelines and the maintainers may choose to vary these in specific circumstances (following discussion) if they feel it is appropriate. For example, if an add-on is discovered to be very harmful, it might be best to remove the add-on immediately to avoid further harm to users. 6. It would be good to have ways to rate add-ons, feature popular or extremely high quality add-ons, etc. so users have some indication of popularity/quality.None of this is intended to devalue the hours of hard work that the add-on maintainers have done. Your efforts are very much appreciated and have not gone unnoticed. My only motiviation is to grow the add-on community and make less work for the maintainers.Thoughts appreciated. Thanks, Jamie
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