Thread: ideas

Originally Posted by SapporoGuy

I started a thread in the mac forums but I thought I'd bring part of it over here too since I'm really beginning to like what I've seen here so far.

@ applications/plugins
Have you considered talking directly with different desktop application developers?
ie, VLC or bluephone elite for the mac

I really think that you could get developers from the desktop world to either open their APIs or even join in the fun and create APIs so that you could access their code directly and avoid the to end design.

VLC does have an api (multiple actually) that anyone could use to create a vlc plugin for om. Not sure about bluephone elite...we certainly would welcome outside integration but were kinda busy with the core work so thats really secondary.

Originally Posted by SapporoGuy

@ OS integration
I have only briefly glanced through what is going on here and with mono.
Cool idea and I get the point of what is being done.

However, I am thinking that each OS has it's own APIs and services which might make users want for more a deeper integration than just universal code.

An example would be that since I'm on OSX, I'd love to be able to NOT have to run a separate DB of information for itunes, iphone contacts, and calendar.

Or does / will this already happen?

Already very easy to do. The nice part about a modular front end is you can use any pieces you want to build it. Theres OMMediaDB which is om's default music database plugin, but this could certainly be swapped out for an ITunesMediaDB plugin (if someone wanted to create it). Contacts and calendar are separate but for good reasons, theres still nothing to prevent you from creating a linking plugin to link in the osx contacts and calendar. Although the bluetooth plugin would probably handle syncing with an iphone.
Right now

Originally Posted by SapporoGuy

@ internationalization
What about the rest of the world?

We have an entire OpenMobile.Globalization class that handles all of these issues. The framework automatically figures out what part of the world the user is in, and units of measure, language, etc. Then it can automatically convert all numbers to the proper units of measure before display. It even does things like properly formatting a phone number based on country.
The default skin is trying to become as language neutral as possible (icons instead of text for things) but for other issues we run in .net which means we have native support for unicode and multiple languages.

There are plans for an automatic localization plugin but thats rather long term. When created this would automatically translate plugins to the users language so you get write once deploy everywhere functionality.

Wow! I think that you are on the right track!

@ further ideas
Here's the thread that I started that goes into more details of what I'm trying to get at in general. mac FE