launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Michael Hudson <michael.hudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Martin Pilkington wrote:
> 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'll hold my judgment in reserve on "better" -- but "different" and
"interesting" I'll grant :)

> 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.

Allowing this kind of experiment is certainly one of the reasons the API
is interesting :)

> 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.

I don't have time really, but I would say that yours is not the first
such attempt.  http://leonov.tv/ was another but it seems to have stalled.

Cheers,
mwh