So I've started following and using twitter far more than I was before. Its really a quite awesome and addictive service, and while I have noticed dozens of slick ways to update twitter, there aren't many easy ways to track your personal Timeline. I decided I wanted a more notification oriented system, so I started to hack apart the gnome-blog applet, and make a little twitter daemon who checks for new updates and uses libnotify to show some lovely notifications. Now it really only monitors feeds now, but I'm planning on hacking up some basic posting abilities in the near future. Anyways, an obligatory screenshot is below:
Anyways, I'd like to vent about 3 problems I see with the state of things at Gnome.
1) Autotools! Blah! NO ONE LIKES THEM! I honestly spent about 50% of my time getting the build to work right, it was painful and a major hurdle to getting started. I know we haven''t really found something that offers the same functionality, but seriously, can't we just beef up waf or something? Not saying I have a solution, just saying we need one if we are going to continue to attract new developers.
2) Bonobo/Gnome-Panel/Applets API: Overly complicated, a pain to test/setup. What are we doing? When KDE4 just dropped the most intuitive widgeting system around on us (and Google Gadgets is popular on other platforms) why can't we take some hints from them? Don't get me wrong, some applets are best written in C and bound to a factory process. But really, for everyday hacks and widgets, we NEED a simple and powerful system, and soon. Webkit provides the perfect engine for us to work from, but we don't have to go with XHTML/CSS/JS. One of the new open Flash platforms is fine, or Moonlight could be awesome. Really, there are tons of options, the pyro desktop could be a start, I'm open to ideas.
3) Project Space: This will probably never be an official Gnome desktop project, but its kinda cool and fun, and I had to host it at Google Code (My only other real option was launchpad) we should really set something up like what fdo has with some personal Git or Hg space to store relevant, but not-yet-ready projects. The wiki is enough for pages on theme, but we need some hosting.
February 6, 2008
ยป Gnome Twitter Applet