Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi
I have been running Big Board ever since it was brought up on this
list. Some questions and observations:
Awesome! We'd love to hear the feedback you have on it.
Is this meant to replace both the top and bottom GNOME panels? I don't
see a equivalent of a task bar if it's meant to replace them both. Why
hasn't the package been submitted for review? The color on the panel
is a plain white and doesn't match the rest of GNOME system colors. I
see no way to move the panel around either. I can understand the lack
of a quit option if it is meant to replace the panel.
Big board is the begining of the replacement for the panels. However
we're not working on any kind of task switcher replacement just yet,
that's another task that we believe can be focused on separately. Right
now we're just using the big board with the existing bottom panel,
moving the top panel applets down accordingly.
Since we're working to get some other elements together it's likely that
big board won't get that kind of panel configuration you expect for a
while as those are features which require lots of small correct details
and thus tend to drag down development of other areas.
A quit option is probably a good idea for big board for now, we just
haven't put it in there yet. Really the inclusion of a quit option has
the inverse graph of the inclusion of other panel features; at some
point they'll meet in the middle :)
Is big board tied to mugshot? What if I don't have a mugshot account?
Trying to change the pic shown on the identity, application
descriptions, more button in calendar etc launches mugshot pages.
Right now it is tied to mugshot so if you don't have a mugshot account
that you're signed into it tries to help you get one (why it's launching
all mugshot pages). A mugshot account is quick, painless, and free to
get and the big board won't do fun stuff until you have one. Right now
big board is using the mugshot application over dbus to talk to request
information from the mugshot server. It's possible to have an alternate
backend to much of what mugshot service provides, it would just require
a lot more preference dialogs for the user to fill out and a lot of work
for us to do in parallel to building big board itself. However we know
that an alternative backend is going to be needed eventually so effort
has been put into the code making it flexible to that need.
The icons including facebook, flickr etc doesn't have any tooltips.
Ah, but they could! Grab a shovel and start digging! That part is
probably only a line or two of code [1]
The functionality of deskbar is not obvious.
We're looking into some ways to make it more obvious. [2] That one has
the code out there in a previous version already, we just need to dig it
up and get it back into deskbar.
The more link on applications launches a side panel. The descriptions
near the search button sometimes overflows the boundary.
Yep, that's a known bug, but since it isn't too big of a deal (i.e.
doesn't hamper usage) we've ignored it. The app browser is lacking lots
of visual quality to it, but we've been heads down on getting things
like the installation and suggested application search working.
Example: Epiphany. Installing a new application via the menu launches
a command line yum command. Though it works this is crude. You should
be using the Yum API and integrating with Pirut instead.
Yep, on rawhide I believe you should be seeing system-config-packages
doing the installation. The yum command line utility is just a hack for
now because the sys-config app didn't support taking a package name as a
command line argument.
Clicking on another area of the desktop doesn't close this menu or
even move it away which is annoying.
Yes, known problem. It's a little frustrating that it's staying on top
right now.
There are three sections - applications, photos and calendar. If i
don't intend to use any or all of these sections in the panel there is
no way to remove them although clicking on it minimizing the section
within the panel.
Ah, you're talking about the soon to be Portfolio Manager! (we call the
sections stocks) The PM is going to be modeled after the application
browser interface, which we aren't at a good point to stop with. So you
should get a very similar feel of being able to search all the stocks
you have installed while looking at a quick view of the stocks you're
using. Also similar hooking into a web service that delivers the most
popular stock in the category / search query you're viewing; helping
you find new stocks.
You might want to also look at the Online Desktop Project page [3] which
has lots of other information about areas of development that include
the big board.
Cheers,
~ Bryan
[1] http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Subversion
[2]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/deskbar-applet-list/2007-April/msg00018.html
[3] http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Online_Desktop_Project
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