[Wiremaster-general] getting started

[mike r. <cov...@ya...>]

Hey guys,



I want to take a few minutes to welcome all of you to the team, do a
quick round of introductions, and present a few potential work areas we
can start with.:) 


Introductions:

I'm Mike. I am the original creator of WireMaster and have been the sole developer so far. 


Jeff Mattfield has offered to help with our ongoing documentation effort. This is a large area, including:
* getting started guide
* user's manual
* web site

As you have probably seen, these areas are currently lacking in a big way, so looking forward to expanding on this.

Priyanka Bansal is a software engineer with experience in Swing and some Java2D. He's offered to help with the coding.

Zachary Sims is a software engineering student atMonash Uni in Melbourne, Australia. He has experience with Java, OpenGL, and C++. He's also offered to help with coding.

Babu Rajendran is a software engineer that has experience with JFC and Swing. As you may have guessed given his background, he's also interested in helping with the code. :)

So those are basic intros, feel free to mail the group and introduce yourself personally if you'd like to add anything. :)

subversion:
I'Zach made a good point in an email, sending .zip files around is a crappy way for multiple people to develop, so I've setup subversion and given all of you read and commit access to the subversion repository, which I've setup here: https://wiremaster.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wiremaster
The trunk/ directory contains the most up to date code, which is currently 0.45 The current release is 0.44 which is tagged in the tags/ directory. I think we can
 keep the current version in trunk that is actively being developed, and branch/tag releases as necessary.



ideas for upcoming tasks/work:
As this is a volunteer project, I think it makes sense for you guys to pick and choose what you'd like to work on, as I would like to keep this project fun, enjoyable, and low stress. :) Here are a list of some ideas for features that I think might be good for the near term:

improve Mac OS X/Linux support - I haven't done much to make wiremaster work on these platforms but friends tell me they've had some mixed success getting it to run.Add Website diagramming - some UI people have asked for the ability to create a sitemap, where each page is a node in a tree that gets built graphically. each page in the tree could then be a seperate wireframe. This would be very helpful for building large sitesA user guide - there are several undocumented but handy features in wiremaster, such as holding down the ctrl key to select multiple objects, moving objects
 with arrow keys, etc. maybe when wiremaster starts for the first time we could put a link to this, and add it to the help menu
more components - it would be great to provide a much richer set of components, possibly in a way that would let people create their own widgetsspecific properties for certain widgets. (e.g., table components have properties like row, column that don't make sense for othere component types)improved look and feel - I would *love* to come up with a slick user interface for this, for example switching between wireframes could animate slide in/slide out, fade, converting the frames and dialogs to a nicer look (maybe like the iphone style black menus with white text, gradients, rounded corners, etc)improve the hand drawn renderer - this is meant to show that a wireframe is in the design stage and not a finished product, but the current draw by hand algorithm does not look very good. improving
 this algorithm would make it look more like a sketch, possibly using different Java2D brush strokes, paths, etc
Again, these are just ideas that I have thought of on some features that I think would be nice. There are several more on the feature tracker on wiremaster's sourceforge site. Given your backgrounds and interests, let's see if any of the above fit, and if not, feel free to suggest some new ones.

Anyway, this email is getting pretty long but I wanted to "get the ball rolling" and start a conversation. What do you guys think? Questions/comments/feedback/ideas sorely needed. :)

-Mike