[tomboy-list] future ideas

[Pete Goodall]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 4:55 AM, Eric S. Johansson <esj at harvee.org> wrote:
> Sandy Armstrong wrote:
>>
>> First thought: this sounds a lot like Google Wave!  With its open
>> protocol, there could be opportunities for Tomboy to innovate in that
>> space.
>>
>
> in some ways it is like wave but when you sit down and go over wave, you
> have a geek and google friendly system.  some people I know have been
> playing with wave and from their perspective it's a UI multicar pileup on
> the info highway with serious overload because of demands for attention.
>  rathole solves those problems. It's very low demand on attention.
>
> another part of my goal was to eliminate as much is possible any need for a
> central infrastructure. I'm finding myself using Google for less and less
> because I don't want them to know as much about me as they do. The short
> explanation design a radical First Amendment supporter and individual rights
> supporter. If your services passes through anybody else's machine to get
> your intended recipient, you screwed up.
>
> I think instead of focusing on how much the communications model looks like
> wave, could we shift the discussion to the concept of "smart paper". The
> reason I ask for that shift is that what I'd like to do with rathole is only
> a small portion of the picture. Having the ability to define a region of the
> page and calculator or something that does a database query and returns the
> results could be interesting. I think I have some good ideas on how to
> minimize the knowledge necessary to do moderately complex tasks yet leave
> the door open for people with too much time on their hands to do the
> complicated things.
>
> Again, this is mostly the thinking out loud stage.

Hi Eric,

It is certainly an interesting idea, but I agree with Sandy.  As I
read your description I kept thinking in the back of my mind, "...this
is Google Wave".  However, coincidentally, I was thinking about Google
Wave this morning on the way to work.  I have yet to hear a whole
heartedly positive review of Google Wave because most (if any) people
don't fully get it.  It may be that Google Wave is just ahead of its
time.

The beauty of Tomboy has always been in it's simplicity and a lot of
ideas come across this list for more advanced functionality.
Thankfully (imo) the Tomboy core devs have resisted many of the more
complicated ideas and accepted (imo) some great ones.

That being said, I do think this idea has merit and maybe such a
system could use some of the underlying infrastructure of Tomboy
without actually altering the Tomboy front end.  As an example I
believe the base of F-Spot is being rolled into Banshee.  These two
applications are related and maybe should share some functionality
(like Banshe displaying photos and F-Spot creating slideshows set to
music), but the UIs remain distinct.  In this way you don't distract
the applications from their core functionality, but you also don't
reinvent the wheel (to coin a phrase).

You mentioned that you don't want to rely on a central service for
this because you don't want your information sitting on someone else's
server.  So do you envision this being a peer-to-peer model?  Maybe
integration with Telepathy?  If you don't have a central server, then
how to do you queue messages?

- Pete

-- 
Pete Goodall <pete at yellowhouse.org>