Hi Guillaume, thank you for your prompt answer. On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:26 PM, Guillaume Lerouge <[email protected]>wrote:

Hi Alex,

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Alexandru Cismaru <[email protected]>wrote:

...

Hi. I'm Alexandru Cismaru (MSc student in Iasi) , last year I was a GSOC student at XWiki, with the RESTful API project.

This year I'm interested again in another project, *XWiki Cross Platform Web and Desktop Widget*. I have done some research and talked with Ludovic, Sergiu and Guillaume on the IRC, so this is what I came out so far:

http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/XWikiWidgetandFirefoxextension.

Looks cool, good work. Overall I like it. I am wondering about a couple things:

- Are your mockups for the FF extension of for the desktop widget?

My mockups are for the desktop/web widget, but I think the firefox extension will also look approximately like the widget. I'm thinking of adding a tiny icon on the status bar that notifies you when something updates, and when you click on the icon it displays a tabbed widget similar to the desktop/web widget. The main difference will be in the Preferences screen, where you will add and remove accounts. The widget will also have a combo for switching between accounts. What do you think?

- If you plan on implementing desktop widgets, have you given a look at the different widget platforms to see how hard your ideas were to implement?

Not really. I think if I develop a widget for a platform (let's say Google Gadgets), it will be quite easy to change the code in order to suite another widget platform. I'll put more information about the implementation on the design page, but I need to think about the modules, and how I can make my code extensible.

- I'm not sure you'll be able to avoid scrolling, in a small widget scrolling seems better than pagination (be it only because every mouse has a scrolling wheel which makes scrolling efficient and easy while pagination takes an additional click)

Don't know, maybe we can find a solution that both looks good and behaves properly.

- I'm not sure the additional RSS feed is that much needed -> if the user already has his watchlist + the public feed, what will the RSS feed be useful for? Doesn't it add complexity without much benefits to be expected?

I thought it would be nice to give the user the possibility to personalize his watchlist tab and I saw that XWiki provides with many rss feeds, for different things.

- Have you given a look to http://www.socialtext.com/products/desktop.php? You might get some inspiration from their implementation.

Thanks for the tip, I'll take a look.

Subsidiary question: if you're planning to develop using HTML + CSS, is using the Adobe AIR framework an option? It would provide us with a cross-platform widget right away, which would be cool... Do you think you could spend, say, 30 minutes investigating the feasability / interest of using the AIR framework for a widget? This might have OSS implications as well (though I don't see why AIR code cuoldn't be Open-Souce), what do others think?

I'll make some reasearch. Thanks again, Alex

Note to other GSoCers -> ask one of the mentors if you want access to the mockup creation tool on incubator.myxwiki.org.

Guillaume

Please give me your feedback and ideas.

...

Thank you, Alexandru Cismaru _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

-- Guillaume Lerouge Product Manager - XWiki Skype ID : wikibc http://guillaumelerouge.com/ _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs