Playing with Big Board

[Bryan Clark]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have been running Big Board ever since it was brought up on this 
> list.  Some questions and observations:
Awesome!  We'd love to hear the feedback you have on it.
> Is this meant to replace both the top and bottom GNOME panels? I don't 
> see a equivalent of a task bar if it's meant to replace them both. Why 
> hasn't the package been submitted for review? The color on the panel 
> is a plain white and doesn't match the rest of GNOME system colors. I 
> see no way to move the panel around either. I can understand the lack 
> of a quit option if it is meant to replace the panel.
Big board is the begining of the replacement for the panels.  However 
we're not working on any kind of task switcher replacement just yet, 
that's another task that we believe can be focused on separately.  Right 
now we're just using the big board with the existing bottom panel, 
moving the top panel applets down accordingly.

Since we're working to get some other elements together it's likely that 
big board won't get that kind of panel configuration you expect for a 
while as those are features which require lots of small correct details 
and thus tend to drag down development of other areas. 

A quit option is probably a good idea for big board for now, we just 
haven't put it in there yet.   Really the inclusion of a quit option has 
the inverse graph of the inclusion of other panel features; at some 
point they'll meet in the middle :)
> Is big board tied to mugshot? What if I don't have a mugshot account? 
> Trying to change the pic shown on the identity, application 
> descriptions, more button in calendar etc launches mugshot pages.
Right now it is tied to mugshot so if you don't have a mugshot account 
that you're signed into it tries to help you get one (why it's launching 
all mugshot pages).  A mugshot account is quick, painless, and free to 
get and the big board won't do fun stuff until you have one.  Right now 
big board is using the mugshot application over dbus to talk to request 
information from the mugshot server.  It's possible to have an alternate 
backend to much of what mugshot service provides, it would just require 
a lot more preference dialogs for the user to fill out and a lot of work 
for us to do in parallel to building big board itself.  However we know 
that an alternative backend is going to be needed eventually so effort 
has been put into the code making it flexible to that need.
> The icons including facebook, flickr etc doesn't have any tooltips. 
Ah, but they could!  Grab a shovel and start digging!  That part is 
probably only a line or two of code [1]

> The functionality of deskbar is not obvious.
We're looking into some ways to make it more obvious. [2]  That one has 
the code out there in a previous version already, we just need to dig it 
up and get it back into deskbar.
>
> The more link on applications launches a side panel. The descriptions 
> near the search button sometimes overflows the boundary. 
Yep, that's a known bug, but since it isn't too big of a deal (i.e. 
doesn't hamper usage) we've ignored it.  The app browser is lacking lots 
of visual quality to it, but we've been heads down on getting things 
like the installation and suggested application search working.
> Example: Epiphany. Installing a new application via the menu launches 
> a command line yum command. Though it works this is crude. You should 
> be using the Yum API and integrating with Pirut instead. 
Yep, on rawhide I believe you should be seeing system-config-packages 
doing the installation.  The yum command line utility is just a hack for 
now because the sys-config app didn't support taking a package name as a 
command line argument.
> Clicking on another area of the desktop doesn't close this menu or 
> even move it away which is annoying.
Yes, known problem.  It's a little frustrating  that it's staying on top 
right now.
> There are three sections - applications, photos and calendar. If i 
> don't intend to use any or all of these sections in the panel there is 
> no way to remove them although clicking on it minimizing the section 
> within the panel.
Ah, you're talking about the soon to be Portfolio Manager!  (we call the 
sections stocks)  The PM is going to be modeled after the application 
browser interface, which we aren't at a good point to stop with.  So you 
should get a very similar feel of being able to search all the stocks 
you have installed while looking at a quick view of the stocks you're 
using.  Also similar hooking into a web service that delivers the most 
popular stock in the category / search query you're viewing;  helping 
you find new stocks.

You might want to also look at the Online Desktop Project page [3] which 
has lots of other information about areas of development that include 
the big board.

Cheers,
~ Bryan

[1] http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Subversion
[2] 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/deskbar-applet-list/2007-April/msg00018.html
[3] http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Online_Desktop_Project