Hi all, One of the to do items that came out of the GNOME OS BoF was for me, Jon and Jimmac to come up with some guidelines for a new application installation/distribution framework. I've been giving this a bit of thought and have a few initial ideas that I wanted to share.
* We need an app store. Having a centralised service for application distribution would make it easier for people to find the applications they are interested in, for us to generate revenue from those applications (perhaps through donations that could be redistributed it to 3rd party developers), and for handling application updates. The app store can be online in the first instance. GNOME 3 will also need a place where installed applications can be viewed and removed; this could be part of System Settings or a separate application. * Core apps shouldn't be visible within the app store, and they shouldn't be removable. Whether they are updated along with the core OS or through the application framework seems to be more of an implementation question. * Sandboxing is important from a security and a trust point of view. Applications should be not be able to undermine or corrupt the core OS, and we need a better way for unresponsive applications to be detected and dealt with [1]. Applications should declare which data and services (eg. location services, local storage) they want to access. These should be visible when a user installs an application, and there should be a place where users can review and potentially revoke applications' permissions. * Online account access [2] can also be considered within the realm of sandboxing. There are a few questions here. One is whether 3rd party applications should be able to use online accounts that have been set up using GOA. If they are, then we might want to include these in per-application permissions. * Defined integration points: we should take this opportunity to specify how applications integrate with the system. They should be restricted to a single application launcher and be required to provide an app icon of a certain size, for example. They should also be required to follow the XDG naming spec, and we could also take this opportunity to better define things like search and notification integration. * We have yet to design a common sharing framework for GNOME [3], but it is something that we would like and is another integration point that we may want to define. I know that Colin is conscious of the security implications of allowing applications to pass data between one another, particularly in light of sandboxing. I guess that we need to discuss this further. * OS version compatibility. This was already covered in the BoF, but it's worth reiterating that ensuring that applications remain compatible with the OS for a reasonable length of time is important from a UX point of view. * We may want to take this opportunity to address issues with the current application definition. One bug that comes to mind is [4]. Again, these are just initial thoughts, and they are only intended to relate to user experience. They might serve as a useful starting point though. Allan [1] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/UnresponsiveApps [2] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOnlineAccounts [3] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Sharing [4] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646506 -- IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ gnome-os-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-os-list
