Thread: Bundle Forces

This is what i have noticed...and also mentioned in a few posts. In speaking with SA (Voices) he is all for it as well.

Anyone else interessted in this idea ? I know Zorro read it and can hardly imagine the other dev'ers arent in those 54 view ;-)

Originally Posted by Noctris

Anyone else interessted in this idea ? I know Zorro read it and can hardly imagine the other dev'ers arent in those 54 view ;-)

No, I didn't read it ... what is it about..?

What you say it absolutely true. A bunch of people working togehter can do more than a bunch of individuals. Thats what they call team

The main problem of getting people working together is coordination. At least one has to give the directions and there has to be a plan what they wanna do ans when they wanna have it done. In real live, these are called "Project Manager" and "Technical draft" / "Project plan"

At this point, forget about the "PM" and the time plan. Just think of the draft.
Making a really good draft, that everyone in the team can implement, is a real challenge and it's totaly time consuming.
I used to work for companies, which needed up to one year for the draft (because of it's complexity) and these guys were working 8 hours a day togehter.

So, the conclusion would be, you don't have to think on every imaginable feature for the product right from the start, but you have to make up something, that is really flexible and that can be modified by everyone (mainly the end-user) and extended by everyone (mainly the programmer).
Just think for example on such thing as HTML. It's pretty dumb itself, but in the right container, extended with Java or Flash you can do tremendous things. Same thing with XML. It's very flexible, because the rules to build such thing are few. So the "end-user" decides whether it'll contain configuration data or a text document.
Another fine thing in such a concept is, that each one in the team can focus on one item. So the development of the whole app, whatever it might be, will be speed up.

Next thing you have to take into account is, that not every developer who has done a nice application yet, is ready to throw it into the bin and start doing a new one. I makes absolute sense to reuse some of the components and ideas that already exist.
This makes it necessary to think on supporting the main programming languages (C#, C++, VB, Delphi) and not to focus at only one.

As you might see, I've been thinking of this quite a long time and I have a picture in my mind, how this could be realized and what's to do.
The weak point on this is: It' in my mind
This means, it's not written down anywhere, so that other can participate and put in their thoughts.
To give you a taste of what it's about, just imagine this:
You're the end-user who is sitting in front of the designer app and you're thinking: "I'm gonna need a mute button on the main screen!" Then you place a new button control on the main screen, assign the DLL/LIB which contains the sound functions to it and assign the "Mute()" function for this button.
Instead of the mute button, this one could also be a button, that is switching some relay (e.g. for the air con), assuming that you have such library or a label, that is showing you the currently tuned radio station from another library. Got where I'm driving at?

As I said, it's not written down... you have to image the rest by yourself

For now, the only support I can give you for your idea is the offer for every .NET developer to use my controls library (zControls) that is shipped with PhoneControl freely.
It's not having too much controls, but you can do everything (such as transparency and skining) you see in PhoCo.

Oops... didn't intend to write that much

This topic has been hashed out many many times. It's vaporware.. Too many reason why it's not going to happen.. But it would be nice if it did..

too many language differences as well, I've posted the same topic not too long ago.

this has just been discussed (although it wasn't intended to be discussed origionally)
There is some good input here:
RFC: new car pc app (sanity check ?!) :)

Some teams can work, like Apache, Linux etc, but they all start with an individual writing a large percentage of the code.

Surely the software projects don't need this kinda development.

I mean major companies like microsoft, nullsoft, the guys who wrote destinator have provided most of the functionality. The guys writing software here are bringing it together into a single interface. Sure some code is getting in deep, but no one is writing code to decode mp3s or plot co-ords on a map from collected GPS data etc. The guys have taken prefabricated components and are filling in the gaps to make it real carputer software.

And I would imagine that part of the satisfaction for them (remember they aren't getting paid, at least not really) is that they have another bit of their carputer that they made, pulling it together into a big software team would remove the individuality they can get from that.

even small development teams need standards and a project leader.. its actually very time consuming to go through code that is not your own and pick out the bad spots and fix them. Also its very hard for others to switch the way they program to fit the group. Then you generally have a big learning curve for new programmers coming on.

Its a lot more time consuming then you think..