I think it would be beneficial to have some sort of an official list of application/feature requests. Preferably with some sort of a “popularity count” – maybe with authenticated users voting? Better yet would be an estimated, ranked size/difficulty of the project. Nothing too crazy, maybe a scale of 1-10 from 1 being very simple to 10 being a massive undertaking.
I suppose it would be along the lines of the official development task list except not dedicated (or even including) Core tasks.
The use-case I see is “I have some spare time and want to write a program for Haiku. What do people want the most? Can I accomplish it within X amount of time?”
If there’s anything already like this, let me know!
I’m not sure…
There have been only very few posts like “What apps do you want?” in the past. I can remember one, coming to the conclusion that a graphical FTP client would be nice, but I don’t think anything came of it yet.
And who should know if someone can accomplish it in X amount of time or the difficulty of a project better than the dev himself?
I guess mostly apps are written to fill the need of the dev. So, if he doesn’t feel (at least the initial) motivation to start with an app, I don’t believe it’ll be a success.
Not sure about the voting. One could call a poll for all suggested apps once in a while to see what the forum people would like most.
Maybe just one thread sticky on top of the “General” forum “What apps do you miss?”. In it people can describe the apps they would like to see, and those are continuously added to the first post of that thread.
(But for that we’d need to work on the forum. New thread upcoming.)
Just to make this clear: All this is nothing the Haiku project can/will do anything about (besides some of dev is intrigued by an idea “privately”). Devs are spread insanely thin to inch closer to a release as it is.
Maybe that whole thing would fit much better to a site like Haikuware…
Wait, there’s no good graphical FTP application for Haiku yet? I was thinking about making one but then saw some listed on Haikuware and changed my mind! I guess I should actually try more of the software listed there instead of just reading the description.
Anyway, maybe this idea about which applications are needed on Haiku would be better suited for Haikuware…
Thanks for the information. I can see how it wouldn’t be very useful for the current developers. However, newcomers like myself who aren’t going to commit to working on Core and don’t really know what the genera user base wants may have a hard time picking a project that is needed.
I definitely agree it would be difficult to specify a particular task’s difficulty rating because developer’s skills to vary. But, for example, it would be easy to discern between something like “Port Chrome” (Extremely huge project, maybe dependencies) and something like “Write a Twitter Feed Widget” (Small to Medium Sized).
While I think you’re right that Haikuware would probably be better suited for this sort of information, to my knowledge that web site is under the control of its owner which makes me (a newcomer) resistant to go there for that sort of information.
Maybe I’ll just create a single thread and see where it goes
Update:
Haha, I posted too soon. Looks like the consensus is to go with Haikuware for this type of data.
I guess I’ll leave that up to someone else if they want to get this sort of a thing going with Haikuware. I don’t know the owner of the site and, as a web developer myself, would rather not request additional functionality that may only be helpful to a very small group of users/developers.
Well, one guy agreeing that Haikuware would be a better fit for such a list, isn’t really a consensus.
Anyway, until Haikuware decides to host such a list, there’s nothing speaking against anyone to open a thread for it in the “General” forum on this site. We just don’t have polls (yet?) and it may need to get bumped to the top once in while not to be forgotten.
So, special website section for “What apps”: probably not. Normal thread (eventually “sticky”, including polls): yes.
Just go ahead and open your thread.
Exactly
I think Get-it is the best working one still, but every one of those listed ftp clients are abandoned and have their share of issues. I used to use NetPenguin, but don’t know if that still works… FTP-fs was best for rather seamlessly integrating ftp: appears as just another folder in the filesystem.
