launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Martin Pilkington <pilky@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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'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.

Hi Martin,

As Michael says, the Launchpad API was intended to enable experiments
like these. However, were I you, I would be seriously considering
working to improve the existing UI, rather than creating my own.

Changing the UI of Launchpad.net might be a little harder and a less
fun than writing a new application, but it does give you an instant,
large user-base and a sizable body of developers. It also means that
whatever improvements you make are shared with the entire Launchpad
community.

Regards,
jml