launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pilkington <pilky@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey all,

Following on from my previous email about minor improvements that could be made to Launchpad, I started playing around with more drastic redesigns. While doing this a thought occurred to me about what Launchpad actually is. At the moment the user interface is a website, but in reality Launchpad is quite a complex application. As such is may be nearly impossible to try and make a great user interface for it if you try to work from the base of building a high end website. A better approach would be to build it as a fully fledged application.

I'm proposing building an alternative UI for Launchpad using the Cappuccino framework. Due to the Launchpad API, this could be a completely separate project and could be provided as an alternative UI. As a completely separate project focused purely on UI, it would allow for a much more unified and consistent UI, which will hopefully end up being easier to use. It will also work more like a fully fledged application, allowing for a more powerful and potentially more customisable user interface.

I will likely start working on this over christmas or in the new year, but it was suggested I post here to see if anyone else would be interested in contributing.

If anyone wants more information on the tools I'm proposing using you can find more information at the following sites:

http://cappuccino.org - The project page for the Cappuccino framework and Objective-J language
http://280atlas.com - The currently in beta IDE developed for Cappuccino (with Cappuccino)

There are also some applications that demo the capabilities of Cappuccino:

http://280slides.com - Slideshow creation software
http://enstore.com - Web store system (video of the admin panel which uses cappuccino is available here: http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2009/10/06/cappuccino-in-checkout-3/)

Thanks

Martin