On 17 Feb 2010, at 17:43, Ram Vedam wrote: > On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Christopher Armstrong > <carmstr...@fastmail.com.au> wrote: > > I've been subscribed to the etoile-dev mailing list for some time but > usually only observe the discussions here. > > On Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:14 +0100, "Quentin Mathé" <qma...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Among the other important stuff to do: > > - Finishing ProjectManager, it's the basis of the WM that is supposed > > to supercede Azalea and implement the project-orientation ideas. This > > one is not currently listed on the Open Projects page. You need to > > know/learn XCB though > > This one sounded interesting to me. I've tried reading some of the > Etoile "vision" and "UI mockup" pages on the web site, which I think I > understand a bit. Is someone able to explain what sort of components are > involved in this piece of the project?
Project manager is going to be the compositing window manager that handles the desktop. Unfortunately, I got side-tracked by LanguageKit, clang, and GNUstep stuff shortly after starting it, so it currently doesn't do much. > >From what I can work out: > * ProjectManager is cross between a workspace and window manager. It > manages a set of user-defined projects. > * It has a window manager. > * There is a way to tag documents or objects to a project, both custom > tags and automatically derived ones (such as e.g. file creation date or > who created it) > * Each project has a set of documents/objects in it. > * There is a shelf for storing objects that aren't necessarily tied to a > particular project or have meaning outside of the projects they appear > in. Pretty much, yes. Jesse's done some nice mockups for how it should work, but I haven't had time to get it actually working like the mockups yet. > I had more questions though: > * How does a user create a new document? Is it a prototyping model, > where they goto a toolbox and drag down a copy of a prototype? Maybe > they take an existing document and copy it using some UI action? Maybe > its simple like the Microsoft "New" context menu in Explorer? I got the > impression that an application model, where the user starts up the > application and selects "New Document", is (from what I've been reading > on the web site) something you guys were trying to avoid)? With the composite document model, the idea is to get away from applications, as such. Most of the options you've outlined are feasible, but cloning is probably going to be the most common one - either from a template or an existing document. Quentin can give a better answer to this, and several of your other questions, but unfortunately you decided to ask the day after he went away on holiday... > * Is there a distinction between objects and documents or are documents > just a type of object (like a "person" or an "email")? A document is a UI abstraction, and object is a developer abstraction. A novel might be a document, and would contain a lot of text regions, images, and so on, each of which are objects. > * Does the object model have a way of linking an object to its > representation" in the UI i.e. given an object, how does ProjectManager > know how to represent it on the screen as an icon or if it isn't open? Yes, see Quentin's work on the generic object manager stuff in EtoileUI. > * Are projects just layed out on the screen as icons? Can a user > organise a project hierarchically or in groups? You will be able to have links between projects. There will be no explicit hierarchy, but you can build one implicitly by creating relations between projects. > * Can projects be worked on collaboratively between users? That's the aim. See Neils' work on using EtoileSerialize over XMPP. > * There didn't appear to be a space for something that represents > stateful objects, like the list of online or offline buddies in the > system or that new mail has arrived (I did notice the "People" tag > though). Perhaps projects can have "notification objects" that don't > necessarily store state but are like lists that match objects meeting > certain criteria e.g. a list of all mail (new and read) that contains a > keyword belonging to the project? Yes, if you look at the list archives (and the roundup from the hackathon), user notifications are something we're planning on doing in a generic way (I remember writing some code for it - not sure what happened to it...). Note also that GNUstep already gives us a nice distributed notification mechanism for low-level notifications. Most of your examples are things that smart groups in CoreObject will handle. > I also have some additional questions in addition to what Chris is asking > regarding the overall vision of "Etoile" at least based on what the > explanation of ProjectManager and what the website explains are the goals of > the project: > > 1) Is the goal to make Etoile apps analagous to UNIX utilities? Where you can > easily mash them up and create a complex application from smaller more > focused applications (thus creating a more compositional-based model)? Yes, exactly. > Would Documents be the way to accomplishing this goal? Documents, using the CoreObject / EtoileUI model are containers for things handled by various components. This is what OLE/COM/ActiveX was meant to do on Windows, and OpenDoc was meant to do on MacOS, but both failed because it is almost impossible to build a proprietary, off-the-shelf, software business around this model. We talked in a bit more detail about this in the FOSS Weekly podcast: http://twit.tv/floss56 David -- Sent from my Cray X1 _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list Etoile-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
