Concept for a New Program

Had an idea, after talking with some people on IRC, who probably will be the only ones reading this by force of an iron first...



Anywho, the idea is simple... yet very effective... A Gnome applet, click it you get a drop down. In this drop down you can drag anything, Text, images, general files... what have you. If it was a remote image, it would save it to a local cache, or predefined saving point for that tab.



The interface would also support a widget system... imagine three tabs, Web Images, Text snippets, and Mail, on the mail tab there is a widget, this widget checks a pop address by it's own configuration. (The Main program would have a basic modular settings UI, the plugin would control what it fills it with. In this way, it's a unified look, and control. But options specific to each widget, or snippet.)



Think of it like the ultimate visual clipboard for one.



There are some crude concepts at the bottom... (My First Concept UIs!)



Secondly, it's a way to view Widgets in a standardized way... perhaps simply support Gdesklet Widgets?



Also I had thought of preset tabs... You know you can make new ones with whatever you want in it, but you can also add the prefabs for things like:



Beagle- Search at the top results at the bottom.



Gaim Intergration - As far as I know you can fetch information from gaim to set up a nice list, names, icons of people they are monitoring or maybe just a scrollable list of all of them. Whatever works.



Deskbar Intergration(?) - As Deskbar is along the same lines... though completely different... why not just integrate it into a tab? The tabs are called by hotkey or mouse click so a simple ctrl+alt+F5 or what have you would call that tab.



Just some ideas... It's completely modular so there aren't any limits!



I was thinking of calling it DropBox... but hey I'm not able to code the thing it's up to the poor guy who takes an interest.



Note Drops:





Widgets (VERY Crude Examples... Sorry):

Feisty, Feisty, Feisty

I've been reading the specs, keeping up with gobby, and I simply must say it sounds very exciting. Now I've been with Ubuntu since Hoary, and I simply must say this is the most exciting release in the making. I just hope all the addressed specs can be managed.

Also, on that note, I was talking to Amaranth on irc the other day about Beryl, Which I've seemed to leap into conversation about a few times. Anyway, some people have really become interested in Beryl as an accessibility concept. Such as the zoom feature, the more keen eyes have seen a variation of the zoom feature kicking around which actually maintains usability while zoomed. The applications there really have no bounds. some of the features intended to be eye-candy such as the negative plugin which shows negative image on a per window basis, has an application for accessibility.

I'd like to point out I'm insanely for Beryl being included in feisty. I believe it will give beryl the force it needs to really get some user input and pick up a huge following. this eventually will lead to more core developers, and an overall better product.

Not to say they're doing bad at ALL. I really just mean with more people using it more developers flare up to the product and we see an even better Beryl.

In other news, anyone score Final Fantasy XII yet? Hoping to eat up a copy monday, look amazing. As you can tell I'm a big Square fan boy.

In other, other news, I just got World of Warcraft going on the Open source ATI Drivers... using Direct3d! You can thank wine for that, along with the AMAZING people heading up the opensource driver team for Radeons. Albeit slow at a 10-20fps It's a constant entirely playable rate. And I actually removed my old windows partition for it.

Slowlt the pieces fall into motion!

MSI K8N Neo4-F
Western Digital 80gb HDD
AMD64 3700+ San Diego Core


Those are the pieces of hardware I've collected this far for my next computer. The 3700+ Is probably one of the better single cores AMD ever made. I still need to come up with the rest but it all should go well. Basically I need an optical drive, GFX Card, and a Stick of Ram to get me started.

In other news I have Beryl running now perfectly on my card 0.1.1 runs like a dream on my laptop. Occasionally when booting with it on it'll lock up but that's a known problem with beryl being worked on. Pretty cool. Jiggly windows! Will post a screenshot at some point, I want to brag.

Proposals for 'Feisty Fawn'

Here I'm going to sum up some with a nice ToC at the beginning.

- Wiki -Like Integration for Hardware help
- Integrated Network Assistant (Including basic support for WinModems Based on availabiliy)
- Community Maintained (Strictly formatted.) Help Wiki-like DB

Wiki integration for hardware help:

Imagine this, you get your network adapter working aces, you plug in a new... printer for examples sake that is known to need minor tweaking to get working. The user sees a nice alert (a la dapper toast system.) Alerting them their piece of hardware may not work out of the box and offers them information for getting it to work. It opens a Page in the browser explaining how to get this hardware working (See Point four).

This would require a locally maintained mirror reference per hardware to be done quickly and painlessly. this database would list hardware calls (As would be seen in the 'Device Manager') and translate them to a call number for example this particular printer could be 1234567 this would open wikinode 1234567 on click. A nice background task (Easily turned off at first run for non newbies) would run and check any new hardware for this. That could be replaced by some kind of hot plug script as far as I know to test new hardware and view it against this local database (Updated by a deb package weekly or something). Think of the Wine AppDB.


Integrated Network Assistant:

Refer to the above section, now think of other possible applications... the infinite problem of WiFi, and win-modems! Imagine this, a nice Network Assistant that can be run, it attempts to detect plugged in hardware by the same route as the Device Manager. this is of course assuming the user says 'My device is not listed here!' For those situations where WiFi Cards don't work but are detected, you know a nice clause for that so we don't waste time where not needed.

This would like above easily either pull from some kind of feed, or link directly to a page instructing you how to get it working, based on past use experience, and a rating system to display which guide helped the most. This guide also mind you can recommend packages assuming there is another available connection otherwise none of this happens. This is why I also suggest a similar portion of Expresso (Is it still called expresso? Oh well.) To handle this but with the packages local and the help DB watered down and organized. this is of course only for the open source non restricted drivers drivers in deb form. Such as SLmodemD (Works for my Winmodem) along with many Wifi drivers which are OSS.


- Community Maintained Hardware specific Help

What we have now for hardware help in wiki form is awesome but it's also mixed into the forum, the Bug boards, all over! I propose a single centralized user maintained, staff moderated web application to handle hardware help, notes, recommended packages, etc.

It would have a nice tagging system which local applications would search through for their hardware as discussed above. You know I have an xyz blah brand pcmcia card that just wont work! The local program intelligently searched for the model under the brands category and pulls up help from this wiki-type-thing.

The applications of this are endless.