Introduction to etolie project says:
allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining
provided Services (aka Applications), Components etc.
This is in fact very attractive idea, but I really consider it a great
challenge to implement nicely. I read a lot of introduction and articles
on etoile website, but found very little information on how this (ease
of adapting workflow) was done or designed. The screenshot also doesn't
seems obviously demonstrating this.
The ability of adapting a workflow is best explained with scenarios. Say:
* A photographer might need to import photos from cameras, pick
images in the first round, crop and retouch (brightness etc) in
the second round, print or make DVD of the result etc. This could
be a daily task. It involve multiple services: image viewer, image
browser, retouching software, album manager with version control
feature, DVD burner, printer monitor (for spool). How he can
improve workflow by customizing, reshaping or recombining services?
* A web designer might need to regularly update a website. She gets
latest content as email attachment from customer, opens it and
copy & paste it without format, add HTML tags to it and preview,
run the update on local web server, retouch images, check for dead
links and validate web-pages, commit the change to svn in chunks,
finally ends her day's job by synchronizing the result to the
productional website. During the whole process she uses a mind
mapping software for keeping overview of the todo list of the
project and keep planning for the future things to do to the
website. She uses a lot of software, How can she optimize her
workflow? She would use software like gimp, kompozer (for working
with HTML tables), jedit for working with HTML/CSS, thunderbird,
rapidsvn, unison (for sync result to the productional server),
openoffice (for reading original documents from customers),
freemind, multiple browsers for testing (opera, firefox, konqueror
for webkit etc) and even accounting software to account her time
on the project. How can she customizing, reshaping or recombining
services?
I know etoile probably could not deliver everything needed now to
optimize these workflows, especially when most software are not based on
GNUStep for users to integrate. But if the project can present the
public an "image", that how things gonna be, it would bring a lot of
interest from people to the project, creating community that make this
happen. Thus if we have clear ideas how we gonna do, how the difference
users would feel if they start to use etoile (with example scenario like
I gave above), then we gain support. How do you think?
And can you paint a picture based on some scenario how Etoile evolves to be?
Thanks
Zhang Weiwu
Beijing, China.
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