Another week
February 9, 2007 at 9:57 pm
(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
Loading ...Hopefully during the next week I should have time to work on several open source projects for a few days. Trouble is… where is the best place to begin? There are so many good projects out there, covering a wide variety of applications, tools and other things, that it is hard to know where to contribute to make a difference.
What I would be interested in, however, is something that makes organising (yes, this is British English after all 
information, and retrieving it easier. Unfortunately, there are a number of projects out there, that whilst good, have no intention of moving into the arena I’m interested in. Several of these applications are Tomboy, Labyrinth to name two in particular. Where I would like to see the two of these projects going is in the direction that neither seems to be taking, namely that of allowing information to be structured in a way that mirrors the brain. I would like to see Tomboy develop a viewing layer on top of the xml data that allows data to be viewed in more than one way, perhaps through the use of xslt and plugins designed to be used with this. It would need two way transformation, as well as the ability to edit in any form. I think this is a pretty tall order. However, the program is not currently structured to allow this.
The above is not a criticism as such of Tomboy, for it is far far better than any desktop tool I’ve seen before, but rather an indication of the direction I’d like to see it take. Unfortunately, if you look at the website, it seems to be merely replicating the functionality of a wiki on the desktop, albeit very elegantly. Having said the above, it is a tool I use daily, and is miles ahead of any windows program that attempts to do a similar job.
Labyrinth, which someone has mentioned as a possible link in to tomboy is again another very useful tool, although not yet as mature as Tomboy. When I say mature I mean its practicality in using the tool everyday is not quite as good as Tomboy, although it is still a pretty useful thing.
I particularly like the idea of a labyrinth style display onto files and folders, showing how they are related in a non-hierarchical manner, such as libraries used by this program, source files for it, and header files and so forth.
I hope to write sometime about Beagle, which is a tool I love and hate at the same time. This relationship will become more clear when I have formulated the post.
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Tags: albeit, contributing, criticism, desktop_tool, development, few_days, free, functionality, gnome, gnome_org, intention, labyrinth, mirrors, open, Open Source, open_source_projects, organising, Software, time_to_work, tomboy, trouble_is, wiki, windows_program, xslt