[Syllable-developer] Where we're at with desktop apps

[Jake H. <jh...@an...>]

Hi all,

Since there have been no posts for the last few days, I thought I'd 
bring up a topic for discussion.  I am nearly finished building the 
latest and greatest KDE under Gentoo Linux on the Powerbook G4 next to 
me.  All I have to say is that anything that takes over a _day_ to 
compile on a 667MHz G4 is not going anywhere near Syllable if I can help 
it!  I am, however, very curious about the total user experience of KDE, 
particularly the PIM portion, as I have recently become an Outlook 
"convert" and it's frustrating that such a useful program for managing 
one's entire schedule and contacts is only available for Windows.

Right now my project plan is to build an open-source Outlook replacement 
for Syllable and other OS's using Ruby.  I've been very impressed with 
the simple elegance of builder compared to the Gentoo emerge system 
which is written in Python, so I really want to see how it stacks up on 
a real project.  As for as GUI toolkits, does anyone know anything about 
Fox?  I saw a chapter on it in a Ruby book I was looking at, and I'd 
never heard about it before but the Windows screenshots looked pretty 
decent and FreeRIDE is pretty good.  So if anyone has any suggestions or 
particular feature requests, or thoughts about Ruby on Syllable 
development in general, let me know.

In broad terms, this is what I see as the main bullet points in order 
for Syllable to meet and eventually exceed the potential on the desktop 
that BeOS once had as the perfect "second OS":

* printing support (CUPS with a good GUI interface)
* a good word processor that can print nicely
* a spreadsheet that can print as well
* a good web browser comparable to Firefox (that can print)
* a good e-mail client comparable to Thunderbird (with printing!)
* an MP3/OGG media player comparable to foobar2000 on Windows
* an Outlook replacement (with Palm sync and SyncML over Bluetooth)
* a WiFi stack (port madwifi stack from Linux)
* FireWire and DV support (a "media OS" requirement)
* Bluetooth (port the excellent Linux stack)
* C# support (a reasonably good port of Mono)

Does that sound like a good set of tasks that could be achieved within 
the next two years?  The reason I'm that optimistic is that I think that 
KDE and GNOME have both gotten bogged down in the intricacies of 
large-scale C++ and C development, respectively, and using something 
like Ruby would give at least a 2x productivity benefit for the client 
side of most of those goals.  And the kernel side mostly involves 
porting open-source code from Linux that we know is good already.  So 
there's a real tangible set of milestones that we could work towards 
that is achievable (the timeline isn't as important as that it's 
achieved) for Syllable 1.0.

-Jake