Features

**mustanglou** · 08-23-2007, 06:04 PM

I've just started looking through the source and needed to organize my thoughts on features I'm interested in building into CarFrontEnd. I thought it would be reasonable to do this publicly so that Dave and others could offer ideas and criticisms. I thought it might be helpful if we could update and mark things off the list as we went along.

These things are listed in no particular order:

Auto-Play feature at wake from sleep
Maintenance Database
Serial Communication (e.g., for OBDII capability)
User Interface Extendability (e.g., skinning)
Visualizations
FLAC Compatibility
Movies
Browse iTunes by artist, album, etc...

**iamgnat** · 08-23-2007, 08:55 PM

Originally Posted by mustanglou

I thought it would be reasonable to do this publicly so that Dave and others could offer ideas and criticisms.

Great idea, my input is below.

I thought it might be helpful if we could update and mark things off the list as we went along.

Technically that's what feature request issue in the Google project are for

But I think it would be a good idea to have a corresponding thread here for everyone to discuss the given request.

Serial Communication (e.g., for OBDII capability)

It will be awhile before I can get to it, so go for it

Let's discuss your ideas for it though as I have a general idea about how I would like to see it implemented so that there isn't extra work going on (by the developer or the application).

User Interface Extendability (e.g., skinning)

As I mentioned in our PMs, I think this is a 2.0 job as I believe (for the best effect) the App will have to be rewritten. But if you have other ideas that may be less invasive, lets talk about them.

Visualizations, Movies

These should be pretty simple plugins, go for it

FLAC Compatibility

Unless iTunes/QuickTimes can be updated to use FLAC, it will require a new Music Player option to add this support. I have no issue with you doing this, just pointing out that it may be more involved than just changing a few lines of code

Browse iTunes by artist, album, etc...

Absolutely needed (all you silly non-playlist using people

). If you want to do it (expanding the existing iTunes plugin) let's come up with a design and you can have at it.

In short, i'd say create feature issues and threads for everything but skinning (until we flesh it out a bit more) (and FLAC is up to you).

-dave

**DrZiplok** · 08-24-2007, 03:22 AM

Originally Posted by mustanglou

FLAC Compatibility

http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/

**mustanglou** · 08-26-2007, 09:29 AM

Cool, Thanks DrZip!

**mustanglou** · 09-01-2007, 06:46 PM

Hey, I just wanted to say I was still alive. I just recently scheduled my qualifying exams so I've been studying hard ever since. After quals (early Oct), I'll have some free time to work on these things. Also, I was thinking, one of the first things I really want to do is add a plugin to keep track of maintenance sorts of things (oil changes, part replacements, fuel milage, etc...). I keep track of this stuff already using pen and paper but it would be more elegant to do this on the carputer.