Ok, since my recent post on Dashboard there has been scattered interest in helping revive/work on Dashboard, so I wanted to post a list of things Dashboard needs before we can really look at making it usable at all.
- libdashboard
- Or as its better known, a C library that generates valid, parseable clues. This is not only critical since most plugin authors aren’t going to want to spend the time validating that mono can deserialize all their XML. But because we can generate bindings for most every other language once we have them in C.
- This is a huge one, Dashboard is still pre-alpha, and mostly proof of concept. While the code base could be brought up to production level, it needs tons of cleanup. This is where an army of open source dev’s can help the most, compile and install dashboard from SVN, then just play with it, and every time it crashes, track down why, and try to make it sane. This is long, slow, tedious, and thankless work, but it is an absolute necessity if people want to start using dashboard, as even simple race cases will crash dashboard most of the time.
- You have to be a little more familiar with the Beagle/Dashboard code base to help out with this, but we need them for a huge spread of plugins, and almost everything beagle can generate.
Just a note, I posted this list on the Dashboard Wiki.
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April 10th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Hi, i’m daniele, and i was looking for a open source project to start with, and i really like your idea, so if you need help just write me an email mrgibber82 at hotmail dot com
April 12th, 2007 at 2:05 am
First of all, what the hell kind of NSA comment procedure do you have….all of this for spam????
Regarding Dashboard, are you really sure you want to do that…the last commit was 5 months ago and the commit messages are not that helpful you know…I remember Miguel telling me that Dashboard work will be continued once the infrastructure for it is in place(meaning beagle and that was 3 years ago)….well beagle has been quite functional for over a year now and yet no work on Dashboard….besides, nat seems to have disappeared.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:41 am
What crazy comment procedure? You just either need an OpenID or sign up with my blog, feel free to e-mail me at kevin _ aT kubasik_net if you know of a better system!
As for dashboard, yeah its development is slow, but most of the hard work has already been done in beagle, Nat has moved on, but dashboard is still a cool idea (at least I think so) and I would love to see if get some love from someone with the know-how to bring it to fruitation. So I leave a standing offer to help anyone who’s looking to get involved with dashboard so that my dream may one day come true!
April 20th, 2007 at 7:26 am
Glad to hear Dashboard development is cranking up again. The original demos Nat presented were one of the main reasons I started paying attention to Linux again. Now I’m more-or-less using Linux w/ GNOME full time instead of Mac OS X. Probably can’t help much with the raw development but I’m happy to run SVN builds for testing and interface design input.
April 25th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Hi Kevin,
Great to see someone else excited about dashboard. I think it is a project that could really revolutionize the way people think about working on a computer. I actually contacted the dashboard mailing list about getting involved in June last year, but Fredrik (who had taken it on as a SOC project) said the project wasn’t in a position to take on new developers at that stage. Now, I probably don’t have as much time as I’d like to contribute to dashboard at the moment, but I’ve pulled down svn and built it. I haven’t been able to do much with it yet, but am very keen to help in any way I can.
I just need to finish hacking on a couple of things for Monodevelop then I’ll probably take a look at dashboard more closely.
If you have an suggestions for a place to start in the meantime…
April 30th, 2007 at 7:17 am
Awesome to see the growing interest! Check out the TODO in the wiki at the Google Code project.