ohloh site now available

The project has been registered on ohloh and a few things set up there.

https://www.ohloh.net/p/pixi

An introduction to the PiXI project

Sometime towards the end of last year I got a little bored and decided to start a project which would give me a lot of scope to experiment with some new tech.

I decided upon porting the Humanized Enso project to C# so I could play around with a similar application with the .NET platform as my playground. Upon looking at some of the Enso source in Python however, I decided it was better to start from scratch (and probably better from a learning point of view).

Some quick hacking away and the first version of PiXI was born. This looked as similar to Enso as I could make it, and attempted to replicate as much functionality as the base Enso install as well as some of the useful plug-ins.

 

It had integration with Facebook, many commands to choose from, notifications displayed at the top of the screen and a very straightforward, clean and opaque UI. I really enjoyed it, although it did have it’s draw backs.

• Framework was heavily tied to some of the plug-ins.
• As it was trying to accomplish too much functionality it was rushed and buggy as a result.
• Trying to maintain an application framework and develop plug-ins is incredibly time consuming.
• Maintaining familiarity with Enso was limiting the scenarios the framework could handle.

So I went back to the drawing board with the following guidelines:

• Maintain only the framework and one plug-in as an example for other developers.
• Simplify and reduce the codes complexity.
• Focus more on package management aspects to facilitate easy deployment for plug-in developers.
• Introduce an easier way for plug-in developers to integrate with the UI for a better user experience.
• KISS everywhere.
• Make it pretty to increase developers and users interest.

So without going into technical changes (that’s another post) here’s what the current build looks like:

Ability to choose a plug-in:

The one plug-in I am going to support and develop (opening start menu applications):

The new notifications area:

Improved notifications icon integration:

 

So there is a lot going on with this little project, and I hope to keep this blog updated as to the applications progress in due course. I am always looking for other committers so if you are a developer and are interested in assisting with the framework please get in contact! If you are interested in making plug-ins I will have the necessary documentation and tutorials on this blog in due course.

It’s always good to know if there’s interest in a new open source project, so please let me know what you think!

Nym